Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We can develop trade between Canada and any other country without introducing a system that bypasses the court system and which favours multinational investors. I will tell the Taoiseach what I do not want, and this is the connection between housing and CETA. I do not want what has happened to the United States, which is that the National Apartment Association, which represents big investors in apartments, has taken the US federal court to court through the investor court system and is claiming billions in losses because of the introduction of a moratorium on evictions. That has just happened in the United States. This is not a hypothetical danger.

Who is the biggest apartment owner in this country? IRES REIT. Who is its parent company? A Canadian property company. Therefore, if the Government were to introduce regulations that controlled or reduced rents or regulated the behaviour of vulture funds and speculators that are benefiting from the housing crisis, we could be sued through the investor court system, as governments have been on a whole range of environmental issues. The French Government has been sued over trying to limit fossil fuel extraction, for example.

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