by Tony Hall
Canadian Forum, Mar. 1997
Republished with permission

In January, the world's new central government came knocking on Canada's door. The message from the World Trade Organization (WTO) was that our Parliament has breached the law of all humankind in establishing rules for the making and selling of magazines. According to the WTO, the elected government of Canada has overstepped its jurisdiction in giving preferential tax and postal treatment to Canadian magazines. In so doing, our government has violated the inalienable rights of Sports Illustrated and other American publications to get identical treatment by inserting some Canadian content in their magazines. While the ruling immediately began generating hot debate about its implications for Canada's so-called cultural industries, for me the decision brought into focus broader issues that ultimately have to do with the condition of democracy and the rule of law on the planet. What is being tested here is the subordination of our elected government to the higher authority of appointed potentates. These potentates conduct most of their business in private in the Geneva-based headquarters of the World Trade Organization.

This new global government was slipped into place with a degree of elitist stealth that makes the work of the Trilateral Commission seem amateur by comparison. Who in Canada can remember ever being asked in a democratic process whether or not we agreed to subordinate our national government to the higher power of the World Trade Organization? Where is there any ballot offering citizens a say in what the WTO does? Where is there any realistic opportunity for parties not powerful enough to control national governments to have their say in the business of the WTO? Why should billions of people on the planet afford any legitimacy at all to a global government whose operations are so dearly hostile to principles of democracy, self-determination and national sovereignty?

The WTO was born quietly on January 1, 1995, as the offspring of the so-called Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). This new entity essentially establishes the overarching framework within which the new regional trading blocs established under NAFTA and the EEC fit. While national governments are at the point of entry into the representative system at the WTO, the real stakeholders are those who own and control transnational corporations. Although the operatives of these transnationals have used the rhetoric of "free trade" to subordinate the power of nation-states, what is really being sought are standardized systems of trade, investment and, especially, property law. This homogenization of the rules governing economic relationships is deemed essential to providing a more predictable, uniform environment for the global operations of transnationals.

An essential analysis of these developments is provided by David Korten in a timely book called When Corporations Rule the World. Korten writes, "Under the WTO a group of unelected trade representatives will become the world's highest court and most powerful legislative body, to which the judgments and authority of all other courts and legislatures will be subordinated." The author then outlines the secretive procedures to be followed in executing this supranational law: "When a challenge to a national or local law is brought before the WTO, the contending parties present their case in a secret hearing before a panel of three experts -generally lawyers who have made their careers representing corporate clients on trade issues. There is no provision for the presentation of alternative perspectives, such as amicus briefs from non-governmental organizations, unless a given panel chooses to solicit them. Documents presented to the panel are secret, except that a government may choose to release its own documents. The identification of the panelists who supported a position or conclusion is explicitly forbidden. The burden of proof is on the defendant to prove that a law in question is not a restriction of trade as defined by GATT."

This is a formula for law-making that makes the closed door process at Meech Lake in 1987 look like a model of participatory democracy. To my way of thinking, the magazine ruling of the WTO is a test case that raises constitutional issues of the most profound kind. What is ultimately at issue is a question of responsible government. Either our government is responsible to the citizens who elected it or it is responsible to the WTO. If the federal government chooses to subordinate itself to the higher authority of the WTO, then it is no longer accountable to the citizenry of Canada. Once the federal government violates the principles of responsible government, then it has effectively violated the rule of law. And without the rule of law, Canada effectively becomes yet another gangster state where the rule of money prevails over all else. Of course, a cynic might say that this is precisely what proponents of corporate rule want. The current anti-democratic remaking of Toronto into a megacity is an example of the kind of approach we can expect to see more of from the same folks who brought us the World Trade Organization.

The WTO's ruling against Canadian efforts to foster and protect our own culture reminds me of the situation faced by many Indians around the turn of the century. In those days, Dominion authorities decided that it was not in Aboriginal peoples' best interests to maintain their Indigenous cultural identities. As a result, legislation was pissed to out' law dancing and giveaways by Indians.

The prohibition against the potlatch of west coast peoples occurred largely because the ceremony offended the capitalist values of many Protestant missionaries. In their view, potlatches were a perversion of basic economic principles, in that Native people acquired wealth not to save and invest it but rather to give it away. This practice seemed to the clergy an unnatural intervention in the free workings of the market that had to be outlawed. Now it is WTO clerics in Calvinist Geneva who are effectively telling Canadians that our cultural practices are primitive and unnatural. We are being subjected to the force of a law not of our own making as surely as Native people in Canada were and are subjected to the same fate under the Indian Act.

Anyone who browses a newsstand in Canada knows that the magazine market is overwhelmed by American publications. For every Canadian title on the shelves, there are literally hundreds of American ones. Here in Lethbridge, I have never once seen a copy of Canadian Forum, This Magazine or Canadian Dimension for sale. On the other hand, if I want to read about hot rods, hunting, mercenaries, masturbatory fantasies or big business, my choices of American products are seemingly endless. Similarly, on the 16 commercial theatre screens here in town, I have not seen a single, identifiably Canadian movie advertised in seven years. The same dearth of Canadian product prevails in the new video rental tabernacles of Lethbridge. In the midst of this wall-to-wall orgy of glossy Americana, the WTO shows up from Geneva to protect my right to a Canadian edition of Sports lllustrated. Excuse me for not playing.

Tony Hall teaches Native American studies at the University of Lethbridge