The SPP and corporate power: “Imaginary citizens” and the democratic deficit of deep integration

The purpose of governments is to create the environment necessary for business to prosper… The North American Competitiveness Council will help in that endeavor and the governments look to the private sector to tell them what needs to be done.

~ U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez speaking at the launch of the CEO-based North American Competitiveness Council (NACC) in Washington, D.C.,
June 15, 2006

This group should drive change.

~ Anonymous Canadian business leader referring to the NACC

It’s safe to say that governments are about much more than creating “the environment for business to prosper.” In fact, one of the main responsibilities of good government is to check the corporate profit motive against more important goals like protecting public health and the environment. Unfortunately, the Security and Prosperity Partnership has more to do with protecting corporate profits from pesky public demands (for a cleaner environment and safer food for instance). That’s why the public has been shut out of the SPP process entirely while North America’s richest CEOs have a permanent seat at the table. This “silent coup d’état,” in the words of the North-South Institute’s John Foster, has been a long time in the making.

From free trade to free reign

Multinational corporations have promoted the same agenda for over 20 years: small governments, low taxes for business, privatization, and free trade. The Canadian government has been happy to oblige, often implementing policy recommendations taken directly from the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE), a lobby group made up of 150 CEOs from the most profitable corporations in Canada (many of which are American-owned branch plants). For instance, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its Canada-U.S. predecessor, the FTA, were developed mostly at the request of big corporations – and for their benefit.

History has a tendency to repeat itself. In 2003, the CCCE initiated a corporate brainstorming session called “The North American Security and Prosperity Initiative.” Out of this process emerged plans for a North American security perimeter, economic integration, and harmonization of several public policies with the United States. In March 2005, leaders in Canada, Mexico and the U.S. integrated almost all of the CCCE’s ideas into a new “Partnership” (the SPP). For the past two years, cross-border working groups have been putting the SPP into effect without asking any of us how we feel about it. Actually, U.S. officials recently admitted to the Council of Canadians that omitting the public is intentional because they want to avoid another “bruising NAFTA battle.”

Meetings for business only

The SPP decision-making process is described officially this way: “meetings” for business, "roundtables” for stakeholders and “briefing sessions” for Parliament. In other words, business people set priorities for the continent, then they consult with stakeholders, whoever they are, and then our democratically elected Members of Parliament are told what to do. This relationship was confirmed in a September 2006 article in Maclean’s magazine in which Ron Covais, President of the Americas for Lockheed Martin who sits on an all-CEO SPP working group called the North American Competitiveness Council, stated that, “The guidance from the [SPP] ministers was, ‘tell us what we need to do and we’ll make it happen.’”

The “boring” details of integration

When the NACC met with SPP ministers in Ottawa in February 2007, members quipped that the Canadian public wouldn’t really want to know the details of what they were recommending because it was all so “boring.” Perhaps, if you consider privatizing Mexico’s state-owned oil company PEMEX, letting U.S. customs officers fingerprint Canadians on Canadian soil, “streamlining” energy sector regulations so it’s easier to plunder the tar sands, and harmonizing food standards across the board to be boring subjects. And these were just the NACC’s short-term priorities. Their February 2007 report stressed that SPP leaders shouldn’t lose sight of bigger ticket items, which, from previous corporate documents, we know includes bulk water exports, a fully integrated military, and Canadian participation in ballistic missile defence.

Harper, the Calgary School and democracy

It should not be ignored that Prime Minister Harper is a student of the so-called Calgary School, a group of American-born and educated academics at the University of Calgary who “have shaped, and now dominate, the thinking of the new Conservative Party,” according to John Ibbitson writing in the Globe and Mail on June 26, 2004. Ibbitson quotes a former professor of the Calgary School who says that the group’s thinking represents “the Canadian appropriation of American neo-conservatism” and encourages “a huge contempt for democracy.” Tom Flanagan, an advisor to Harper, comes out of the school, which is also closely linked to the Fraser Institute and the National Citizens Coalition. The latter group wants Canada to “entrench property rights” like they do in the U.S. and was founded in opposition to public medicare.

Ibbitson listed the school’s tenets as including major increases in defence spending, experimenting with private health care, seeking closer ties and possibly a customs union with the United States, using foreign aid to promote free trade around the world, and generally reducing the scope of federal social programs. While it was the Liberals who initiated the SPP in 2005, the Conservative government has taken on the agenda with zeal and pushed Canada into an even closer military and foreign policy alliance with the United States. These may be big-ticket items for the Calgary School and the big-business lobby, but they consistently rank very low in polls listing Canadian priorities. Thus the “contempt for democracy,” that is also integral to the SPP.

No public input = no legitimacy

The biggest insult here is that these CEOs and the few elected officials who have a seat at the SPP table never even considered how any of us feel about these recommendations for continental integration. We are “imaginary citizens,” as John Foster remarked at the Integrate This! teach-in this past March in Ottawa. But the silent coup d’état is not irreversible. It’s time for us, the “imaginary citizens,” to demand that our government disband the anti-democratic NACC, halt the corporate-led deep integration agenda, and bring the SPP to Parliament for a full, open and public debate. Contrary to Harper’s philosophical background with the Calgary School, and to the U.S. Commerce Secretary’s limited sense of what a government should do, in a democracy like Canada, without public support, the SPP has no legitimacy.

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