Fax your MP: "M.A.I.? Tell us why!"
THE MULTILATERAL AGREEMENT ON INVESTMENT (MAI) would cap 25 years of deliberate erosion of control over transnational corporations. OPIRG-Carleton has designed a campaign, in cooperation with the Alliance for Public Accountability, which takes the first step toward preventing total loss of citizen control. To encourage you to take action, we have created a convenient tear-off form on the reverse which you can fax or email it back to us at OPIRG-Carleton.
FARCE HEARINGS
Sergio Marchi, Minister for International Trade, is allowing only an illusion of public consultation on the MAI. He has permitted only snap hearings with no publicity, with just 20 hours of public input, and no hearings outside Ottawa. He required the House of Commons Subcommittee on International Trade to deliver its report right after its MAI hearings ended on Nov. 27th. The parent committee (Foreign Affairs) in turn tabled in Parliament its recommendations the week of Dec. 8th.
With a Liberal majority, these committees reported little more than what the principal Ministers involved wanted to hear. The government may claim that any dissenting committee member's report does not represent an accurate reading of MAI aims or credible citizen concerns.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
It's up to us to ensure the government answers for the real intentions behind the MAI. The first steps are as follows:
Please fax your MP, using our website free fax link and model letter attached. Ask these reasonable questions:
- Who would benefit from
the MAI, and how?
- Who would bear what costs and risks, and why should they? *
Follow up with a phone call to arrange a meeting of your MP and a small group of people concerned about the MAI (see form below). Do not condone any attempt by your MP to avoid a meeting. At the meeting, resist the temptation to simply argue "no." Rather, focus on the above questions, then let your MP tell you how much he or she knows.
Be sure to ask your MP for a copy of the October 1997 MAI draft text. (Without it, your MP cannot claim to be properly informed.) Say that such a major proposal should be a publicly available document. The Minister made copies freely available at the MAI hearings in Ottawa.
Did your MP have the October MAI draft? Did s/he agree to see you? We will release the data you send us to the media, analyze your MPs' letters and meeting results, identify common responses, and compare them to the predictable Parliamentary report. Did your MP respond to your letter? Or try to find out the MAI answers? (We will follow up later on these questions.)
Your response will help us show that MPs have not been well enough informed to either give or withhold consent to what the government really intends on the MAI: whose needs it is really honouring and why? Many MPs cannot or will not answer these questions. But the public needs them answered before Canada says yes or no to the MAI. Pressuring MPs will also encourage their party leadership to be more forthcoming about the MAI aims.
* At the same time, university economic and law students can ask the "who" questions of their instructors to see what their professors know!
Finally, sign, circulate and return our petition. It calls on the responsible Minister, Sergio Marchi, to issue a statement answering basic questions about the MAI. Then the public can challenge the validity of his government's claims about the MAI. We will forward the petitions to Minister Marchi and media, in effect saying, "no answering, no signing of the MAI!"
NO ANSWERS, NO MAI!
The objective is to postpone signing of the MAI until our elected representatives and citizens at large are properly informed. We note that the Liberal government majority in the House of Commons is only six seats. As a U.S. senator put it, "When I feel the heat, I see the light."