Greg Holloway’s rant against the Transpacific Partnership trade treaty (Letters, Jan. 1) does not explain why getting fair treatment is somehow bad. I expect he would be quite happy to sue a company or a government for changing the rules to disadvantage him.
One question is what Holloway means by “democracy”, which can be tyranny of the majority. Often that restricts honest people from trading values, under several guises including local content laws, subsidies and technical product rules that make trade impractical.
Viking Aviation’s experience in Communist China seems a case, with the country of many slipshod products trying to claim that a product from a country with high standards, a product greatly improved since its beginnings, is not safe enough.
In contrast, Canada, the U.S. and European countries have substantially harmonized rules. Achieving that did take leaders such as Craig Beard, Gerry Marsters and Duncan Marshall, who turned regulations away from the not-invented-here attitude of earlier aviation regulation officials. An attitude that lived on in automotive matters, with a Canadian official claiming that rules of the country that led Canada to safer cars aren’t good enough for Canada.
It all sounds like a conspiracy theorist who believes the fixed-pie drive-to-the-bottom teachings of the most murderous ideology of the 20th century – Karl Marx would be pleased to hear his anti-mind presumptions used.
Keith Sketchley
Saanich