Some Assembly Required

I've not posted here in a long time, but this is both important enough and will have to be long enough to not fit in on Twitter or Facebook, so here I am. That said, I'm going to try to keep it short. The right to assemble is guaranteed in our Charter. Why is this right so important it's enshrined in our governing documents like this? It's so we can change the government when we can't afford to wait for the next election to do so. We're in just that situation. This has become an emergency. We need to assemble to change the government of Canada. It's time to go to Ottawa and let them know that what is happening in there is not acceptable.

The reason there's a distinction between the right to assemble and the right to association in the Charter is because association is what allows people to team up to accomplish things, while the right to assemble allows associated people to change the government when the usual rules by which we change governments means we can't at the moment and we can't afford to wait for the rules to work.

Here's how it works. The people come to realise we're in a situation where the usual rules about how we change government are not sufficient; we can't wait until the next election because the people in the government are egregiously damaging the nation. The people assemble in front of the parliament to demand a change in government. If enough people feel strongly enough about it and there are enough people assembling in front of the house of government, it makes continuing its operation impossible. While the powers that be are very stubborn and will attempt to use police and military forces to suborn the expression of that right, if enough people assemble on Parliament Hill for long enough it will result in a changing of the government.

A good recent example of this is what happened in Iceland after their banking crisis, when the people of Iceland assembled in front of their parliament to demand a change in government after they realised what the government was going to do; make the debts of private institutions that had been criminally run the liabilities of the people of Iceland, rather than the people that had actually accumulated those debts. It was an emergency that did not allow the usual mechanisms of democratic control to work, so the people of Iceland took the exceptional step of assembly to stop it.

I think we're in just such an emergency right now. The reason why I think this at long last is because of the FIPA with China. Harper has just "ratified" the Canada-China Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement. Now, I'm not a constitutional scholar or anything, but I was under the impression that it required more than just Cabinet agreement to ratify treaties like this; parliament must pass enabling legislation, as well as legislation putting its terms into force of law. Because of these lacks it's possible that this is an illegal agreement anyway, but I don't think we can depend on that possibility to save our bacon. The fact that this agreement was negotiated in secret and "ratified" by a tiny group of people who've used all the usual spin tricks to get it to slip under the radar upon its announcement (Friday right before quitting time, short written announcement, right at the same time the Ford brothers were playing their game of musical municipal positions) tells me they hope no-one really understands what's in there. There has been no parliamentary debate, no public debate, no opportunity for Canadians to discover just what is being agreed to. It's being presented as a fait accompli; something that's a done deal and that we shouldn't really worry our pretty little heads over, and I'm sure the legislation to enable it and give it force of law will be brought in the next budget omnibus bill where it'll be buried along with a thousand other tiny little changes just as it's been for the past few years.

This agreement is so lopsided that even the elite investment organ The Financial Post and its editor Diane Francis think it's a terrible idea. This woman is not generally known as a person who is onside with outfits like Greenpeace, or unions, but she clearly thinks it's a terrible idea, and here's why: If a Chinese firm (either private or public) decides they don't like that your town doesn't want to allow something to happen within it, they can sue your town for the value of the project. Basically, if your town decides they don't want to let a firm like (for example) Ting Hsin International Group to pump out all your groundwater for bottling and shipping to China, they can sue you for the profits they expected to make. This means that this agreement hands control over your water to any Chinese firm that decides they want it and can find someone local to agree to help hand it over.

It really puts all those "we need an agent in your country" spam emails that you see from Chinese firms into perspective, doesn't it? They're looking for people to work locally so they can get the in to say "give us what we want or we'll sue you into oblivion with the full weight of the Chinese state behind it." As soon as they can find someone to act locally for them as an agent, they'll be able to sue if the local government decides they don't want to permit it, whether that government be of your municipality, province, or even the government of Canada. This basically hands over control of how we live to the Chinese investor class.

If you think this is just about resources, you should also consider that they'll probably be happy to sue over things like minimum wage laws, unionization rules, workplace safety regulations, local infrastructure requirements for facilities, waste disposal regulations (have you seen what it's like in the Chinese industrial heartland?) and so on and so forth. This agreement is about taking control of how we live in Canada away from us the people and handing it to the global oligarchical class. I don't recall agreeing to be governed by the norms of Chinese state-owned enterprises or the Chinese investor class, and I'm willing to bet that even the people who voted for the Conservatives didn't either. I've been cranky about how things have been going in Canada because lately we've been governed by the norms of our own investor class and they seem to think treating the people that do the work poorly is a-ok... but it's nothing like what you can expect to see from Chinese investors: you should think about what it's like working for Chinese firms in China before you think it's okay to let them sue over these issues when democratically decided by the people they affect. My grandfathers must be rolling in their graves to see this happening here.

It's very clear that Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada have no respect for the rules of our democracy, the norms of our democracy, or the Canadian people. They are not democratic in any meaningful way and are attempting to govern by executive fiat as if we were an authoritarian state, rather than one where the power of the state flows from the permission of the governed. They are taking Canada into a race to the bottom so we can all enjoy the working and living conditions enjoyed by the Chinese labour class, and doing so gleefully.

So, what to do? We don't have much time, and there will be no election between now and two weeks from now when it goes into force. This is a political emergency by any definition of the word... and assembly is how we as Western democracies deal with political emergencies like this.

It's time. It's an emergency. There's only one way to deal with this. We need to assemble on Parliament Hill in front of the Centre Block.