Fraudulent Talk About
Canada and the Rule of Law
  
The Trudeau government makes much ado about Canada
being
a "rule of law country." The argument has been made a lot lately
in
defence of Canada's arbitrary arrest of a Chinese executive of
the
Huawei Company at the behest of the United States. The government
has
also used it to justify Canada's ongoing sales of military
vehicles to
Saudi Arabia based on a contract having been signed with that
country
and General Dynamics that could not be broken.
 However, the rule of
law
logic does not apply in the government's dealing with the auto
monopolies. Many see a double standard. GM stands accused of
breaking
several written and unwritten agreements, throwing workers' lives
and
their communities into turmoil, abandoning perfectly good means
of
production, and refusing to return billions
of dollars in public money given to it allegedly to avoid its
failure.
Yet, the governments of Canada and Ontario stand aloof, declaring
that
GM's
trashing of contracts is a private business decision.
Are Canadians to accept that the rule of law is a
weapon to be used selectively to hammer those standing up for
their
rights such as Indigenous land defenders and workers on strike
such as
postal workers, or to legitimize the arrest of an executive of a
Chinese company on spurious grounds that the U.S. demands it?
This
self-serving use of the
rule of law to serve powerful interests throws the entire concept
of
the rule of law into contempt.
If governments refuse to intervene in public
affairs in
a manner that favours the people, and specifically in the case of
GM to
hold it accountable for its practices, Canadians should make sure
they
boycott those political parties that allow this to happen. The
people
should refuse to vote for either the Liberals or Conservatives
who both
have
taken part in selling out autoworkers and refuse to hold GM to
account
and defend the rights of Canadian workers and our collective
economy.
The NDP government of Bob Rae was infamous for introducing
pensions
holidays for companies like GM which it declared "too big to
fail." It
is high time workers select candidates for election who represent
them,
not the rich, and turn things around in their favour.
This article was published in
Number 2 - January 24, 2019
Article Link:
Fraudulent Talk About
Canada and the Rule of Law
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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