18 Year Wait for Fair Treatment from Canada under NAFTA
The dispute settlement process is broken and it doesn't work.
This was the experience of Sun Belt Water Inc. when it filed its formal claim under NAFTA in 1999.
In 1998, Sun Belt Water Inc gave Notice to Canada that it intended to file a claim under NAFTA.
The Sun Belt claim under NAFTA arose because the Government of British Columbia treated it very badly, discriminated against it by paying a settlement to its Canadian partner and refusing to settle with it and then jerked Sun Belt Water Inc. around in court proceedings in British Columbia where lawyers obstructed justice by committing perjury and concealing evidence and the judges played along, as co-criminals, by denying usual requests for disclosure of documents and running out of hearings just to cause Sun Belt Water Inc. to waste resources on multiple hearings.
A couple of times on the campaign trial, US President Trump commented about Canada that the judges were crooked and in this respect he was dead right.
Certainly not all the judges in Canada are crooked but there have been and continue to be enough crooked judges in Canada that Canadians have completely lost confidence in their justice system and American investors in Canada need some kind of dispute settlement system to resolve disputes without having to reply on the notoriously crooked Canadian justice system.
So, Sun Belt Water considered its options and decided to abandon the crooked Canadian courts and seek a resolution under the dispute settlement mechanism that was allegedly inserted in the NAFTA to give American and Canadian investors an option other than the crooked courts in Mexico. Of course Canada does not admit its court system is crooked but it is and that is a fact that is now widely accepted by most Canadians.
Unfortunately, the present dispute settlement process is not a FAIR process for a small investor like Sun Belt Water Inc. with one Canadian lawyer in a legal dispute with a relative colossus like the Government of Canada with 10,000 lawyers many of whom are completely crooked.
Initially Sun Belt Water thought it would get fair treatment from the Government of Canada under the NAFTA because the wording of NAFTA requires Canada to treat American investors fairly and Canada, at a national level, then had a good but illusory reputation for honesty and justice in its dealings with foreign investors.
initially everything seemed to be going fine, John Gero the Director General for Canada handling the dispute set up the meeting under Chaprter 11 where the partes are required to meet to try to resolve the dispute by consultation and negotiation.
Mr. Gero asked for and committed Canada to full transparency. Sun Belt agreed to full transparency. Transparency basically means that each side tells the other the full details of what was going on that led to the dispute. So, again, in good faith Sun Belt sent Mr. Gero hundreds of pages of documents in advance of the meeting but Sun Belt soon learned that transparency was a one way street and Canada refused to provide any documentation.
So, from the very beginning, the Canadian government was playing games in the dispute settlement process and, unfortunately, there was no independent judge to order Canada to provide disclosure.
Mr. Gero lamely advised that disclosure of documents would be discussed at the meeting so Sun Belt Water Inc. CEO Jack Lindsey and his lawyer John Carten travelled to Ottawa for the first scheduled meeting in January 1999 but at the meeting no documents were disclosed. In fact, the first meeting was cancelled the morning on the meeting because the British Columbia government had showed up with a lawyer that the Canadian government did not like. At that time Premier Glen Clark ruled British Columbia and he and his NDP pals were not well liked by the Ottawa establishment.
Acting in good faith, Sun Belt CEO Jack Lindsey and its lawyer went to two further meetings and went over all the documents explained the case and reviewed the projections on estimated losses but the Canadian government officials were playing fairly and refused to disclose anything.
The so-called dispute settlement mechanism didn't work and Sun Belt served Canada filed a formal demand for arbitration and claim under Chapter 11 of the NAFTA in October 1999. Initially Canada would not accept the claim because it said Sun Belt must formally waive its lawsuit in the courts. So, Sun Belt provided the waiver and the process was initiated.
The written Notice of Claim and Demand for Arbitration was explosive and contained full details of the many crimes committed by British Columbian lawyers, civil servants and a few politicians. The Canadian Government refused to publish the document on its web site, lied to the world by denying a proper Notice of Claim had been filed AND THE COVER UP BEGAN and a whole lot of key witnesses dropped dead in circumstances that suggest they were murdered including 12 judges who made obviously crooked decisions.
The great lesson of the Nixon Watergate Scandal is that the cover up is often greater than the crime committed and that is exactly what happened in the case of the cover up of the Sun Belt Water Inc. claim against Canada under NAFTA..
BREAKING NEWS MORE TO COME ....