Diana Gibson “The U.S. had also made energy part of their security agreement. Their national security and their energy security are one and the same.”
– Diana Gibson





Peter Julian and Elizabeth May “What we have seen is not unprecedented prosperity for all Canadians, but unprecedented prosperity for corporate lawyers and CEOs.”
– Peter Julian

INTEGRATE THIS! Challenging the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America

A report by the Council of Canadians

PART III: WHAT WE HEARD

Panel 3: The Democratic Deficit: Parliament and the SPP

While the Council of Canadians is a non-partisan organization, we spend a lot of time talking to politicians. Sometimes we communicate by delivering thousands of petitions to their offices, as we did with Environment Minister John Baird on March 22, 2007. We often we get our message to them by flooding their offices with emails and faxes. When strategic, we make presentations to Parliamentary committees and lobby government leaders. But we rarely get the chance to hear politicians respond to our concerns in an open forum. That’s why we invited representatives from the four major political parties to the Integrate This! teach-in. We wanted to hear what they had to say about the Security and Prosperity Partnership, and Canada-U.S. relations in general.

The Conservative Party refused our invitation, the Liberals ignored it, and the Bloc Québécois agreed to send a representative, but cancelled the day before the teach-in.

Peter Julian, the NDP Member of Parliament for Burnaby-New Westminster and critic for international trade, and Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada, addressed our questions alongside José Antonio Almazán, a Deputy with the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) in Mexico.

Peter Julian began the discussion by announcing that NAFTA has failed. He said that the notion that NAFTA has brought more prosperity, employment and exports to Canada is actually a myth.

“Since the signing in 1989 of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement that later morphed into NAFTA …what we have seen is not unprecedented prosperity for all Canadians, but unprecedented prosperity for corporate lawyers and CEOs.”

Julian pointed out that since 1989, the poorest of Canadian families have lost over one month of income per year, their income having declined by an average of 9 per cent. According the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, working class and middle income Canadians lost the equivalent of about two weeks of income in the same period. Meanwhile, the wealthiest of Canadians have seen their real income skyrocket by nearly 20 per cent, representing a “complete re-jigging of our economic system.”

Julian debunked the notion that NAFTA has led to full employment, pointing to the shift that has occurred in Canada, away from full-time unionized jobs and toward part-time temporary jobs.

He suggested that the reason why the Canadian government has kept the Security and Prosperity Partnership negotiations under wraps, is because “they know when it is a head-to-head debate with the Canadian public (we saw that with the Canada-U.S. free trade debate, we’ve seen this with NAFTA) increasingly they lose the public debate.”

Elizabeth May referred to the SPP as an “attack on our core identity and on our sovereignty by stealth.”

For May, the SPP represents a “fork in the road for Canadian society – whether we are going to pursue traditional Canadian values internationally, or whether we are going to become part of Fortress North America, a large gated community where U.S. security forces will guard the perimeter and all Canadians will be allowed to move about freely, provided we’re willing to have our irises scanned …”

May added that the Green Party is determined to make the Security and Prosperity Partnership an election issue.

José Antonio Almazán spoke about how his party, the PRD, views the impact of the Security and Prosperity Partnership in Mexico:

“The SPP is not an alliance, it’s a relationship of subordination. In the context of the constitutional and legal framework of Mexico, we consider it to be a semi-colonial arrangement, insofar as it implies even more of a loss of our sovereignty as a nation.” Almazán said that the agreement represents “security and prosperity for the imperial intentions of the United States,” and is leading to a greater push within Mexico to privatize the country’s publicly owned oil and gas companies.

Still, Almazán believes that there is cause for optimism. He recently participated in a meeting with Peter Julian and other “progressive parliamentarians” to strategize about how to defeat the SPP. He said that opposition to the SPP has been growing within parliamentary and congressional spheres within Mexico, and it has also taken hold among civil society activists.

Almazán expressed gratitude for the “conscious and dignified grassroots participation” at the Integrate This! teach-in, which he said “is really where we build strong movements to defend what is ours – this planet, our lands, our water, our forests, our natural resources, life.”

previous | next

« return to index