8-20-07, 9:41 am

The media spotlight will shine on Montebello, Quebec, when George W. Bush, Stephen Harper, and Felipe Calderon meet Aug. 20-21 for the third annual summit of North American leaders. But their real business has been taking place behind closed doors, away from the eyes of the 450 million inhabitants of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.

The Montebello meeting will be held under one of the widest security blankets in history. The Council of Canadians has been barred from renting a community centre for an August 19 public forum six kilometres from Montebello. The RCMP, the Sureté du Québec (SQ) and the U.S. Army will not allow the Council to rent the Centre Communautaire de Papineauville for a forum on the eve of the 'Security and Prosperity Partnership Leaders Summit.'

'It is deplorable that we are being prevented from bringing together a panel of writers, academics and parliamentarians to share their concerns with Canadians,' said Brent Patterson, director of organizing with the Council of Canadians. 'Meanwhile, six kilometres away, corporate leaders from the United States, Mexico and Canada will have unimpeded access to our political leaders.'

In fact, the RCMP and the SQ will enforce a 25-kilometre security perimeter around the nearby Chateau Montebello. Checkpoints at Thurso and Hawkesbury will turn back vehicles carrying more than five people. Protests will take place in Ottawa and other cities, but at PV press time, it appeared that nothing will penetrate the military barrier around the summit.

It's a far different story, of course, for the powerful corporate forces guiding the summit agenda. The 'Security and Prosperity Partnership' is the most advanced version of the 'trade agreements' first floated by the Mulroney Tories in the 1980s, leading to the Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA.

That process had roots in the post-war Abbott Plan, the far-reaching program launched by Mackenzie King's Liberal government to turn Canada into a supplier of raw materials for U.S. imperialism, with long term negative impacts on this country's manufacturing base and economic sovereignty. Communist Party leader Tim Buck predicted at the time that this shift would transform Canada into a full participant in the U.S. war drive. During the following decades, most federal governments refrained from direct involvement in U.S. wars of aggression, projecting an image of Canada as 'peacekeeper.' But as U.S. domination of the economy grew, foreign policy shifts became more open, leading to Canada's participation in the NATO war against Yugoslavia in 1999. Under the Harper Tories, Canada's foreign policy is fully aligned with that of the USA. Our military mission in Afghanistan clearly has nothing to do with 'liberating women,' and everything to do with backing the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Of course, the continentalist project has met great controversy and even setbacks. There were some controls over foreign ownership during the 1970s, and the Multilateral Agreement on Investments was defeated in the wake of the 'Battle in Seattle' and a major revolt by Third World countries.

Today's crop of North American leaders lack any popular mandate to push through the SPP democratically. George W. Bush is widely detested after stealing two elections and dragging his country into the Iraq war. Stephen Harper won just 37% of the popular vote in January 2006, remaining in office thanks only to a divided opposition. And Mexico's Felipe Calderon is widely believed to have stolen his election victory in 2006.

Despite all this, continental integration is on the march. As author Linda McQuaig wrote recently, 'What's happened is that those pushing for deeper Canada-U.S. integration - principally members of the corporate elite on both sides of the border - have become more sophisticated in their strategy. Rather than loudly trumpeting their agenda, they've made their push largely invisible.

'Their latest vehicle is the Security and Prosperity Partnership. Since it was officially launched by the leaders of the U.S., Canada and Mexico in March 2005, it's operated largely under the radar, even though it deals with some of the most important issues a nation faces - national security and energy, as well as trade... The public has been completely shut out of the SPP process. The key advisory body in the SPP is an all-business group called the North American Competitiveness Council, made up of 30 CEOs from the U.S., Canada and Mexico.'

According to the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC) website, 'The SPP provides the framework to ensure that North America is the safest and best place to live and do business. It includes ambitious security and prosperity programs to keep our borders closed to terrorism yet open to trade.'

That introduction is followed by considerable hype about 'three great nations... bound by a shared belief in freedom, economic opportunity, and strong democratic institutions.' (Apparently election theft is now a 'democratic institution.')

Getting to the heart of the matter, the website reports that since the SPP listed 300 'priorities' in 2005, the NACC took the opportunity to 'focus the process and develop a real priority list.'

With a straight face, the NACC explains 'This is a very open and transparent process. Literally hundreds of companies, sectorial associations, and local chambers of commerce have helped prepare our recommendations. No one has ever been turned away.' (Well, perhaps nobody from big business.)

'The three governments established the NACC to collect guidance from the private sector. Members were charged with helping the governments focus their efforts by applying a cost-benefit analysis to the ideas on the table... Together, the NACC members and Secretariats from all three countries have prepared extensive recommendations on such issues as border crossing facilitation, standards and regulatory cooperation, and energy integration.'

The NACC explains that it 'provides a voice for the private sector' through regular meetings with Ministers and senior officials - as though big business has never had the ear of North American governments.

'The NACC is comprised of 30 members with equal representation from each country, with each country [read: each government] determining its own members...'

In August 2006, the NACC 'Report to Leaders' submitted 105 recommendations on such issues as border crossing facilitation, standards and regulatory cooperation, and energy integration.

So what are these recommendations?

Part of the SPP agenda involves developing common North American standards on how food is produced, inspected, processed, and transported. Unfortunately, the SPP does not intend to improve these standards in the interests of producers and consumers. The goal is to remove 'trade irritants' and deregulate food industries.

Again quoting Linda McQuaig: 'Take the small example of the harmonization of regulations involving pesticides. This harmonizing of standards ... has been underway for more than a decade under NAFTA, but it is now being fast-tracked under the SPP.

'So, as the Ottawa Citizen reported in May 2007, Canada is raising the limits on pesticide residue permitted on fruits and vegetables, to bring Canadian standards into line with weaker U.S. standards.... Canada's standards are already weak enough. For example, both Canada and the U.S. permit the pesticide permethrin to be used at levels 400 times higher than the European Union permits; we allow methoxychlor at levels 1,400 times above the European limit.'

There are other frightening hints of the full deep integration agenda. Last spring, during hearings of the Commons International Trade Committee, Gordon Laxer, head of Alberta's Parkland Institute, was testifying on the energy implications of the SPP. As he warned that provisions to keep Canadian oil flowing to the United States could leave eastern Canada 'freezing in the dark,' he was ordered to stop by committee chair Leon Benoit, a Conservative MP. Liberal and NDP committee members overruled Benoit, who stomped out.

The so-called 'no fly' list' is very much a Security and Prosperity Partnership initiative,' warns the Council of Canadians. The NACC 'Report to Leaders' point 93 states: 'Develop, test, evaluate and implement a plan to establish comparable aviation passenger screening, and the screening of baggage and air cargo (for North America).' The list raises enormous privacy concerns, and there is no evidence that it will improve airline security.

David Dodge, the head of the Bank of Canada, told a Chicago audience that a single currency for North America 'is possible.' The end of the Canadian dollar would severely limit the ability of governments to guide the economy through monetary policy; several Latin American countries have already switched to the US dollar.

Deep integrationists clearly see Canadian water as a North American resource. Discussion of bulk 'water transfers' and diversions took place last April 27 at a Calgary meeting of the North American Future 2025 Project (partly funded by the U.S. government).

As author Murray Dobbin points out, 'the meeting based its deliberations on the false notion that Canada has 20 per cent of the world's fresh water. Actual available supply amounts to only around six per cent - about the same as has the U.S. The water (and environment) meeting was preceded by another on April 26 talking about `North American' energy.'

Canadian provinces are pushing ahead with SPP-related projects. As Murray Dobbin writes, the Alberta-BC Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA) 'is a major piece of the deep integration, deregulation imperative and fits hand in glove with the SPP. There is a similar, though more informal, process evolving in the Atlantic provinces, called Atlantica. And B.C. is now pushing the so-called Gateway Initiative, a kind of regional superhighway project that will see huge and environmentally disastrous expansion of ports, highways and pipelines to further supply the U.S.'s insatiable demand for resources and cheap Asian goods.'

Fortunately, all hope is not lost. Thirteen U.S. state governments have already passed resolutions directing Congress to drop out of the SPP: Idaho, Georgia, Arizona, Missouri, Illinois, Oregon, Montana, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, South Dakota, Tennessee, Washington and Virginia. Part of the opposition is focused on plans for a 'NAFTA Superhighway' - a corridor several hundred metres wide including rail lines, freeways and pipelines from Mexico to the Canadian border. From the Canadian and Mexican perspectives, such a corridor can only be seen as a giant straw sucking resources into the U.S., at the cost of industrial employment.

Opposition within the U.S. itself signals growing realization that unchecked corporate power has dangerous implications for the entire continent.

The Montebello protests will serve to raise awareness of this danger among Canadians. Sooner or later, the Harper Tories will be forced to go to the polls, and their full-scale drive to integrate Canada into the U.S. empire will be the single most critical election issue. The last time an election was held on such terms was the 1988 'free trade' campaign, when corporate money and fear tactics pulled out a victory for the Conservatives, even though more than 60% of voters backed anti-free trade parties. We can't afford to lose again!

From People's Voice

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