FIPA deal concerning

If you are unaware of the Chinese Foreign Investment and Protection Agreement, soon to be ratified, you should be.

I am express my concerns over the most massive giveaway of natural resources and thereby Canadian sovereignty I may witness in my lifetime.

I am deeply concerned over the Chinese Foreign Investment and Protection Agreement (FIPA).

I have always been ambivalent about Remembrance Day.

My father, Armand Jacob, as a 13 year old child during WW II was bombed by the Americans in his home town of Frankfurt, Germany.

My father-in-law, Richard Gook fought what most people would acknowledge as being a necessary war against a European dictatorship.

My father was a social-democrat, my father-in-law was a staunch conservative.

Yet both men, I believe, would be equally outraged at the ignorance about and disrespect for the men and women who fought for Canada that the Chinese FIPA represents.

The old defenders of Canada would view China as a communist country and, as such, a dictatorship.

Any relinquishing of control over Canadian energy resources to this dictatorship the old defenders of freedom would view as economic treason.

I have spent as much of the past year as I have had available to me – I work and raise a family of three children – raising important questions over the energetic and economic viability of the proposed Enbridge pipeline through northern B.C.

I participated as an intervener in the Northern Gateway National Energy Board Joint Review Panel hearings in January 2012.

I and many others have made the mistake of too much narrowing our focus on just one aspect of the economic- environmental- social debt problem we face today and ignoring the bigger picture.

Throughout the JRP process, I asked: What’s the plan to deal with the plummeting net energy returns of our major fossil fuel energy resources? (See JRP intervenor presentation by Chris Peter and Norm Jacob Jan 18, 2012).

I had been ignorant of the plan represented by the Energy Policy Institute of Canada (EPIC August 2012) energy policy.

The EPIC document states that EPIC is comprised of “leading Canadian energy organizations.”

It is the source of the Omnibus bills recently passed in Parliament and spells out the future direction of energy resource development in Canada.

If I and relatively active and participating Canadians were unaware of the National Energy Policy that EPIC represents, how much more unaware must past defenders of Canada – including many people who helped create the Reform Party and current Conservative Party – be of the present redefining of Canada?

The government of today may think that it has met its obligations for a public process.

Certainly a major redirection in the meaning and fundamental values of this country such as the Chinese FIPA represents, requires more than the usual FIPA Environmental Assessment.

This is a constitutional matter and I will let others more knowledgable in constitutional law address this question.

I am raising the moral question for which every citizen is qualified.

The Government of Canada has a moral obligation to include and fully involve citizens and past leaders of this country in non-partisan discussions over this epic redefining of Canada.

If people are unaware of the likely consequences of the Chinese FIPA then they cannot be said to have supported the agreement.

The government will then be as good as any dictatorship for pushing it through Parliament.

I believe the present Government does not fully comprehend the consequences of the proposed agreement.

Unlike most other countries, Canada has never experienced a civil war.

The present direction of the government is the stuff of civil war.

If the government pushes the agreement through without genuinely involving all parts of Canadian society it invites grave consequences.

Norm Jacob Prince George