The person of interest might be Elizabeth Warren, US Senator for Massachusetts. It might be Justin Trudeau, when we get to the dumb questions. And it could easily be the heads of three Canadian banks: RBC, CIBC, and Scotiabank.

The three banks are revealed here as being heavily involved in registering corporations in the Bahamas, presumably to avoid paying tax. I will select a few quotes from that page.

According to the data, RBC registered 847 companies, CIBC registered 632 and Scotiabank registered 481 in the Bahamas between 1990 and this past May.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” said Richard Leblanc, a leading corporate governance expert and professor at Harvard and York universities. “Why are there so many companies registered and such a high volume in a jurisdiction that doesn’t have the population base or the economy to support it? That’s a legitimate question.”

Unlike 103 other countries, including well-known tax havens, the Bahamas has, to date, refused to sign a global treaty that the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development calls the “most powerful instrument against offshore tax evasion and avoidance.”

In case you think I’m smoking cheap dope here, I’ll give a pointer to a C.R.S. report provided by www.fas.org (Secrecy News, c/o The Federation of American Scientists.) There you will find that the profits of (just) US controlled corporations as a percentage of GDP runs from being much of the country to twenty times (!) the GDP there. This in a report requested by the US Congress.

Back to the Star article, where you will find this: (emphasis mine)

For more than a century, Canadian bank executives have played an instrumental role in shaping the banking laws in tax havens, said Alain Deneault, a professor at the Université de Montréal and author of Offshore: Tax Havens and the Rule of Global Crime.

Starting in the early 19th century and right through to the establishment of the modern offshore system in the 1960s, Deneault said, “Canadian banks customized the legislation in Caribbean tax havens for their purposes: They are states made to allow large companies and wealthy individuals to avoid paying tax.”

Banks “purchase the sovereignty” of these countries to have the laws they wish, he said. “It’s a banker’s fantasy. Ask a banker what their ideal country would look like and that’s exactly what you find in the Bahamas.”

Now to tie in Elizabeth Warren. Again, emphasis mine:

ISDS would allow foreign companies to challenge U.S. laws — and potentially to pick up huge payouts from taxpayers — without ever stepping foot in a U.S. court. Here’s how it would work. Imagine that the United States bans a toxic chemical that is often added to gasoline because of its health and environmental consequences. If a foreign company that makes the toxic chemical opposes the law, it would normally have to challenge it in a U.S. court. But with ISDS, the company could skip the U.S. courts and go before an international panel of arbitrators. If the company won, the ruling couldn’t be challenged in U.S. courts, and the arbitration panel could require American taxpayers to cough up millions — and even billions — of dollars in damages.

If that seems shocking, buckle your seat belt. ISDS could lead to gigantic fines, but it wouldn’t employ independent judges. Instead, highly paid corporate lawyers would go back and forth between representing corporations one day and sitting in judgment the next. Maybe that makes sense in an arbitration between two corporations, but not in cases between corporations and governments. If you’re a lawyer looking to maintain or attract high-paying corporate clients, how likely are you to rule against those corporations when it’s your turn in the judge’s seat?

If the tilt toward giant corporations wasn’t clear enough, consider who would get to use this special court: only international investors, which are, by and large, big corporations. So if a Vietnamese company with U.S. operations wanted to challenge an increase in the U.S. minimum wage, it could use ISDS. But if an American labor union believed Vietnam was allowing Vietnamese companies to pay slave wages in violation of trade commitments, the union would have to make its case in the Vietnamese courts.

Elizabeth Warren was writing from the standpoint of a United States Senator. If she thinks the TPP agreement, by including ISDS, challenges American sovereignty, then what are the prospects for Canada under such a ‘trade’ agreement?

(I will quote Noam Chomsky? or was it Paul Krugman in The Great Unravelling? These are not trade agreements, they are capital agreements. They allow the means of production to be moved anywhere. Now we also allow the fruits of production to be taxed anywhere too.)

That’s where Justin Trudeau might come into the picture.

• Our Canadian banks have been, apparently, pioneers in the use of jurisdictions like the Bahamas to offshore profits and hide wealth. Our banks have, in a sense, purchased the sovereignty of the Bahamas to achieve this end.
• ISDS clauses in trade agreements similarly sell out the trading country’s sovereignty.
• Large corporations are the beneficiaries of all of the above.
• Ordinary people have not benefited from rising national and corporate wealth.

Now for the dumb questions, and they are addressed to Justin Trudeau as well as for my ‘ordinary citizen’ readers’ enjoyment:

1. Will you as minimum remove the ISDS clause from any TPP agreement?
2. From any future trade agreement?
3. Will you champion the investigation into tax havens? Collaborate with the Americans, if possible, without losing freedom of action?
4. Will any questions at all be asked of the Canadian banks named in the Star, or their CEOs, regarding ‘sharp practices’ in their clients aided by themselves?
5. Is the continuing export – of jobs, of taxable profit, in short, of citizen well-being, going to continue?
6. Do you want to be the Prime Minister if you can’t at least bend this situation into a slightly better shape?
7. Comments? You know where to find me.