If TransCanada wins either lawsuit, who pays up?
I’m suspecting it’s me, and other taxpayers. Or maybe our children.
If only there was a way to put a lien on everything owned by office-holder opponents of Keystone, until THEY (and maybe THEIR children) personally pay the settlement. Obama, especially. Maybe they’d think twice about such inane rulings.
NAFTA disputes are not settled by lawsuits, they are settled by an arbitration panel and the judiciary in each of the NAFTA nations has to honor the arbitration panel's decision.
There have been many decisions handed down by the NAFTA arbitration panel thru the years. And under TPP disputes will also be resolved by arbitration.
This TransCanada dispute would be very similar to the MetalClad and Methenex disputes, which were also pursued under Chapter 11.
When ever a nation doesn't honor the arbitration panel's decision, then the arbitration panel awards "sanctioned retaliation" to the offended country, which means that the offended country can legally retaliate by applying tariffs to goods from the offending country.
There has been only one instance of "sanctioned retaliation" under NAFTA and that was over the US not letting in the Mexican trucks, which allowed Mexico to legally impose tariffs on other US goods such as apples, which made US apples more expensive than Chinese apples, and hurt US apple growers. However, Mexico took the US into arbitration under Chapter 20, and Chapter 11 may be different.
Here is an older article where Investor-State dispute resolution mechanisms and the arbitration panel are discussed in regard to the Keystone pipeline.
You can also find a lot of info by Google searching Investor-State trade agreements, or Investor-State disputes, or Investor-State law.
A lot of people don't like the fact that the arbitration panel can trump US laws/regulations. The leftwingers don't like it because they think that investor protections in Chapter 11 give the investors too much power over labor, the environment, and social justice. That's why the unions are madder than hell at Obama over the TransPacific Partnership(TPP)