Keynote Address On The Theme Of A Just Economy
 
“Globalize This” Conference sponsored by The Ontario Public Interest Research Group at the University of Windsor
 
February 3, 2001

On Tuesday of this week a new Parliament was opened, and in the Speech from the Throne the government spoke of its commitment to successfully completing a Free Trade Area of tbe Americas, as a follow on and expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In that Throne Speech mention of the FTAA, and the Summit of the Americas meeting this spring in Quebec City, there was not even the slightest hint that any Canadians had any concerns whatsoever with the prospect of an FTAA, and the further entrenchment of the ideology already enshrined in existing regional agreements like NAFTA, and global agreements like the WTO.

Indeed, when Alexa McDonough asked the Prime Minister why there was no acknowledgement of such concerns, the Prime Minister replied that he didn’t know there was any problems. One was reminded of the casual way in which he once dismissed the pepper spraying of students at the APEC meetings in Vancouver a few years ago. It can only be hoped that this is not a sign of things to come in Quebec City.

In any event when it comes to free trade, Canadians have a government that has, shall we say, a countenance unclouded by thought. In that sense, we live in a time of great danger, plagued as we are by governments who have given themselves over completely and uncritically to a view of the world that is ultimately anti-democratic and subversive of the very democratic power that these same governments claim to value and to exercise in the public interest.

But in another sense, we live in a time not only of great danger, but also of great hope, for the corporate agenda is not advancing as fast and as easy as it would like. And the Americanization of the variety of political and economic cultures that are represented at trade negotiating tables is meeting with resistance, in the streets and within the negotiations themselves. The MAI was abandoned, although there will no doubt be new attempts at an investment agreement. It was killed by a combination of public opposition, and the position on culture taken by the French government. And the negotiations in Seattle failed, again by a combination of what was happening in the streets and what was happening inside, with the streets emboldening those on the inside who had objections to various aspects of the WTO agenda. I am thinking here of Europeans defending their agricultural policies against the strictly free market approach advocated by the U.S.A., or developing countries objecting to the elitist anti-democratic structure of the WTO itself. Unfortunately these same developing countries continue to refuse out of hand to even discuss core labour standards, let alone build them into such agreements.

I had the good fortune to be in Seattle in 1999, to catch a little tear gas, and to be part of a great peaceful protest that was underreported, while what violence there was, was over reported, and became the justification for the mass harassment and arrest of peaceful protestors in what could only be described as actions akin to what one would expect in a police state. I remember a rally and march of some 50,000 people, trade unionists, environmentalists, aboriginal people, farmers, food safety activists, church leaders, etc. all marching together, united by one common theme, democracy. Because whatever disagreements such groups may have about various issues, they have this in common, they would like differences to be settled democratically and not by a trade tribunal that is mandated to take into account only whether something is a barrier to trade or not.

A society is not a democracy if trade is the measure of all things, and if the rights of investors and corporate profit strategies are given a place of privilege in our hierarchy of values. There is something perverse about a moral hierarchy that enshrines the rights of the powerful, and leaves the rights of the powerless, and of creation, to another day. And the fact that so many young people see this is also a sign of great hope. Imagine that. These young people actually believe what they were taught in school, that they live in a democracy, and that their elected parliament should have more power than trade rules which don’t include labour, environmental or human rights standards. What a pity that the Prime Minister doesn’t even acknowledge their concerns, and that a right-wing media establishment is more comfortable ridiculing them than listening to them.

And so when I saw that I was expected to talk about what might constitute a just economy, it seemed to me that the first task of such a discussion, and the one I intend to dwell on today, is, what would be a first principle of a just economy, not in the sense of a just economy’s goals, which might be things like greater equality or environmental sustainability, but rather what is the pre-condition of a just economy, or as it used to be said in the 80’s before the whole international economic idea became contaminated by corporate globalization, what are the conditions for a new, just, sustainable, and participatory international economic order.

The pre-condition that I want to emphasize is democracy, real democracy, where the policy options and policy choices of democratically elected governments are not circumscribed and narrowed by free trade agreements that go far beyond what was traditionally understood by free trade. These so-called free trade agreements regulate domestic policy not just on tariffs, but in sectors like energy, investment, culture, drug pricing, water management, and environmental regulation. It is an irony of the l990’s that as democracy became more popular, in the sense of there being numerically more democracies in the world, the scope of what was within the reach of such democratically elected governments was drastically narrowed.

It’s a question of whether the world, understood as ideologically neutral, was becoming safe for democracy, which would be the official version, or whether the capitalist world was becoming safe from democracy. Some of what used to be accomplished by imperialistic strategies, by authoritarian or dictatorial regimes, or by having to win real elections, can now be a accomplished simply by pursuing the internal logic and dictates of free trade agreements. Democracies may be more in number, these days, but they are shadows of what some of them once were, and even paler shadows of what their citizens would like them to be.

In Canada these last few weeks, there has been much speculation in the media about parliamentary reform, with talk about how to redistribute power within Parliament to give more power to backbenchers, and to the House of Commons itself over against the executive and the Prime Minister’s office. What is too often left unsaid in such discussions is that the real issue is not how to redistribute what power Parliament has. The real issue is how to give back to Parliaments, to national and sub-national legislatures in many places, the power that has been usurped, or more often abdicated, by way of acceding to trade agreements whose very purpose is to limit the power of government and increase the power of the marketplace to control our lives.

If I may be permitted an aside at this point, I find it strange that many on the political right can be so concerned about the transfer of power from Parliament to the courts, thanks to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but totally unconcerned about the transfer of power from Parliament to the WTO, or the NAFTA. And the National Post can write editorials denouncing the idea that Canada should pay heed to or support things like an International Court, while at the same time making fun of protestors who think that whether a country imports genetically modified food or asbestos should be a democratic, national, decision, and not a multi-lateral trade decision.

We cannot have a just, sustainable, and participatory economy, nationally or globally, without a deepening and widening of democracy. We can’t decide to price energy in a way that may help Canadians, and the environment, but not the oil companies’ profits, if we have trade agreements like NAFTA that prohibit such policies. We can’t protect our water from bulk export if we have agreements like the NAFTA which make that impossible. We can’t protect the environment, if we are subject to lawsuits under Chapter Eleven of the NAFTA, whereby companies can use the investor-state dispute mechanism to challenge environmental laws and regulations that get in the way of their profit strategies.

We can’t protect our culture and cultural diversity in general, if the American view of culture as entertainment, as marketable commodity and marketable commodity alone, comes to dominate all trade agreements. And we won’t be able to protect, here in Canada, the non-free market ways of doing things we have developed in certain sectors, like health, education, and the selling of wheat, if plans now afoot at the General Agreement on Trade and Services, and other tables at the WTO succeed.

Indeed, if one believes, as I do, that an essential ingredient of creating a just economy is the ability to be able to regulate, limit, or even proscribe the role of the marketplace, as we have done in health care insurance for example, then the free trade agreements are truly an anathema. And not just because they get in the way of certain policies. What is even more destructive, as I see it, is the effect these trade agreements have on our way of thinking. They break down notions of community, the common good, the public interest, the integrity of the environment, and replace them with a borderless world in which every place is to be judged on its suitability as a profit generator. Things that would have been thought impossible, or not thought of at all, become possible. Free trade creates a moral void that remind one of Neistche’s dictum that if God is dead, all is permissible. With free trade, attacks on policies that were once sacrosanct become permissible and justified in the name of market access, national treatment and level playing field.

In order to have a just global economy, we need to have a level playing field. Not the level playing field that is sought by corporate negotiators, who, incidentally are on both sides or all sides of trade negotiations, and are the real negotiators. At WTO negotiating tables it is partly an illusion that countries are negotiating with each other. What is also true is that the various national negotiators in any particular sector are being advised by the same multinational corporations.

We need a different kind of level playing field. We need a global level playing field in which all the citizens of the world, as citizens of the world, and as citizens of their various countries, have the same core democratic, human, and labour rights. It’s not a level playing field if workers in Canada have to compete with workers who can’t organize a union without ending up in the river. It’s not a level playing field if the people of democratic countries have to harmonize with what is acceptable in non-democratic countries, or turn a blind eye to human rights violations in the name of trade liberalization. In this sense, China is the worst offender, and with its ascension to the WTO will put at the table one of the worst political configurations yet, a form of one party totalitarian capitalism.

It is not true that trade makes them more like us. What is true that the current model of corporate globalization is making us more like them, as we see the increasing criminalization of dissent, and the transformation of our democracies into political monocultures where the only policy debate that can be taken seriously is that which takes place with the boundaries of the imposed creed. And this limited policy debate itself can only take place within artificially created situations, or temporarily gated communities rendered politically antiseptic. I used to joke, after Seattle, that the next meeting of the WTO would take place in the Falkland Islands. The fact that it now appears it will happen in Quatar, may be off the mark geographically, but not in terms of where the WTO is going. Its allergy to public access is an eloquent statement about itself.

All over the world, in various forms and in varying degrees, we need, in a catch 22 sort of way, more democracy in order to restore democracy where it has been abdicated, or create it where there has been a seamless transition from one form of authority to another. But herein lies the problem. The trade agreements have created a vicious cycle of despair and cynicism about politics. The perception that it doesn’t make any difference is both true and false. It is true in the sense that the trade agreements, along with various other instruments of corporate globalization like the IMF, are doing what they were designed to do. They are restricting the policy choices of governments and reducing the differences to be observed between governments. But is false in the sense that there are still political choices to make, and in the sense that there are still political parties who want to resist, oppose, and replace the corporate globalization model. But they need help. They need for people not to give up on electoral politics, and put all their hope in protest or in NGO’s or civil society. To do this is to do what the corporate globalizers want us to do. They want a world, in which political choice is negated, and the corporate boardrooms run the world by default.

There is a role for NGO’s, for civil society, for social movements, and for protest, but there is also a role for an electoral politics in which politicians and political parties are judged by whether they embrace or reject corporate globalization, and by the quality and quantity of their resistance, to corporate globalization, whether in opposition or government. To take a pass on such choices in the name of despair, or cynicism about the homogenizing power of the trade agreements, is to give free trade its ultimate victory. My message to you today is don’t give it that victory.