No one asks to be colonized… do they?

So here’s the sitch.  Big Pharma (the catchall phrase to indicate all of the major pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, Unilever, etc) has the most powerful lobby mechanisms in history.  Our government is so enamoured of BP (pun intended) that it smacks of an episode of the Bachelor – one swanky dude swarmed by a fleet of preening fans, each desperate to bat her eyelashes most prettily.  However, the BP privilege is far greater than its vote-swaying ways.  To explain my point, I suggest we call it something other than a collection of corporations.

Big Pharma is a nation state.  It has an ever expanding populous, a specific and defined culture, system of laws and independent governance.  This last point is of particular import – as evidenced by CETA and other trade agreements, the patent system and its myriad of revisions to protect BP, this nation is not answerable to any other government outside of influences from the UN or World Bank… like any other country.

Now, Canada is home to 34 million residents.  These residents have a wide range of health care needs.  Canadians also consider the tending of such needs to be a basic human right.  We contribute our tax dollars willingly to the common good of medical access for all citizens.

When BP first arrived on our shores, in its pillbottle Mayflower, it brought promise of treasures we’d not known before.  Penicillin, polio vaccines… Viagra.  Our distinctly Canadian culture created the socialized distribution of these drugs, grateful for the explorers who had come to elevate us from our ignorance.  Over the years, like any good colonist would do, BP constructed an increasingly dependant relationship with the savages they found on our land.  Each promising new drug that our public money saw through preliminary trials was scooped up by our landholding visitors – very good, little farmer, we’ll take that.  Don’t you worry your pretty little heads about completing the final stages now that you’ve invested so much time and money already!  Here’s a shiny nickel… run along.  Take some potatoes with you.

Today the nation of Big Pharma controls almost all of Canadian access to life-saving medications and interventions.  They also control almost all of Canadian access to agricultural products that allow us to compete in the food production markets, upon which our ecosystems are now dependant; products with health hazards sometimes requiring drugs from the BP States.  If the BPs were to withdraw their presence in Canada for only one month, thousands of people would die – starved of insulin, heart medications, antibiotics – and others would go mad – suddenly bereft of antipsychotic regimens – while our chemically dependant crops would fail miserably.  Sure, BP would suffer losses in the millions, but with profit margins in the billions they can afford the inevitably unwavering deference that such an act would purchase.

Like the Spanish invasion of South America and the Philippines, the Dutch and French in Africa, the British in India and Native America, the BPs have gained economic control over our ability to sustain our most basic survival, cloaked in the paternalistic guise of working in “our best interest” with technology we don’t have, and wealth we didn’t imagine.  It wasn’t as obvious, of course.  There weren’t red coats and rifles.  The colonization was political and economic.  The lobbies are their tanks, rolling over our self-determination, flatting it to the ground.   Committee canons blow holes in policies intended to uplift the less fortunate, while the firing squads shoot pink slips at MPs who resist.   Local culture (altruism, peacekeeping) is undermined by increasing privatization of health care, in an effort to impose the colonist’s profiteering values.  Evasive maneuvers (closed-doors) drew in the powerful members of the World Bank and UN to skew the law. CETA is part of the growing worship of a foreign god, as BP is not only mainstreamed but revered.

Canada has been colonized.  Only, unlike the Mayans, Pakistanis, Congalese … we asked for it.

But we can still learn from our international sisters and brothers.  India did not find independence in a day.  Like any revolution, we need to start grassroots.  Small steps to build an infrastructure that can bear the medical burden that will collapse upon us when BP is overthrown.  We need to construct pharmaceutical self-governance, making increasingly public that which is privately held unjustly.  Publicly funded research needs to hang onto its patents.  We need public entities to produce and distribute medicines (employing Canadians instead of making American stockholders more wealthy).  They may offer us treaties, but we will know better.   We know that “trickledown economics” is more trick than economical, that the disparities between the rich and poor grow as nations like BP gain international power.   That our economy is not dependent on this particular arrangement any more than the US was to Britain – economy is fluid, elastic, stretching and snapping as values pull it in different directions.  It will adapt.  Instead of feeding the insatiable appetite of the BP elite, we can nurture the visionaries of our future, like Martin Luther turning over the Bible to the masses, repealing patent-sanctity and making medical access as public as it should be!

History, as it tends, has repeated itself.  But if we take care, take notice, and take action, the story of colonization will cycle through to the coup we require.  Our health is too valuable to leave in the hands of a nation that, like other BPs before it, will be all to ready to make an irreparable mess, say oops, and cash in early retirement while those whose lives have been tarred struggle to clean up the spill.