Harper has displayed hypocrisy when it comes to China. When first elected prime minister in 2006, he routinely condemned China’s human-rights record and promised to not trade “Canadian values” for the “almighty dollar.” By 2010, Harper had changed his tune, allowing Sinopec, the Chinese petroleum giant, to buy a stake in Syncrude that permits it to decide whether its bitumen is refined in Canada or shipped abroad. Two years later, Harper did not stop the Chinese state-owned oil company CNOOC from buying the Calgary-based resource company Nexen for $15.1-billion.
Moreover, there are pipelines that will send bitumen from the oil sands to China – including Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan – which the Harper government has wholeheartedly endorsed.
Even more alarmingly, Harper secretly signed the Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (FIPA) with China while attending an APEC summit in Vladivostok, Russia in 2012. What’s the problem with this agreement?
China has invested over $30-billion in the Canadian energy sector alone, and its companies are significant investors in the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline. Yet the FIPA agreement would allow China to sue Canada if the pipeline was not built.
"Chinese investors can sue Canada for any actions by the federal government or the B.C. government (or legislature or courts) relating to Chinese assets connected to the [Enbridge] Northern Gateway pipeline," Osgoode Hall law professor and investment treaty expert Gus Van Harten told The Vancouver Observer last September. Van Harten argued that the deal was not only disadvantageous to Canada, but also potentially unconstitutional.
"More troubling, there is no requirement in the treaty for the federal government to make public the fact of a Chinese investor's lawsuit against Canada until an award has been issued by a tribunal. This means that the federal government could settle the lawsuit by paying out public money before an award is issued, and we would never know."
One small B.C. First Nation, the Hupacasath, issued a legal challenge in 2012 against FIPA, arguing that the deal threatened constitutionally protected Indigenous land rights, and that it was signed without any consultation. The Federal Court and Federal Court of appeal dismissed the case, claiming any claims of FIPA’s impact were “speculative.”
Despite widespread public opposition in Canada from citizens, First Nations and businesses, FIPA was quietly ratified in September 2014, locking Canadians into the deal with China until 2045
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