NAFTA and War

I am highly critical of the North American Free Trade Agreement. I could rant for a long time on the consequences and disadvantages of this treaty, but right now I'm going to focus on one; one that nobody really talks about.

NAFTA is a direct threat to Canadian sovereignty, most notably in our ability to dictate our policy towards war. With the takeover of Canadian companies and investment in Canadian resources by American corporations, we lose the ability to decide whether or not we will contribute to a war effort. Chapter 11 of NAFTA basically allows American or Mexican companies to sue the Canadian government if it imposes policies that affect their investments. So basically if the Canadian government wants to block molten sulphur from being sold from the Scotford Upgrader in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta to defense companies in the United States to be used as components in bomb manufacture, or stopping DOW Chemical in Fort Saskatchewan from exporting Agent Orange to the US, it legally can be sued for this. These two examples do and have happened, respectively. Another example was the former Canadian company SNC-Technologies, which partnered with General Dynamics in 2005 to take on a $1.2 billion contract to produce munitions for the US Department of Defense[1]. Undoubtedly some of these bullets were used in the Iraq War.

In effect, this treaty allows the US to use Canada as an industrial base to support it's war effort, undermining our moral sovereignty and exploiting our resources for the purpose of causing death and suffering around the globe.