Antonia Juhasz and Maude Barlow “The economy should serve communities and people, and we will not rest until we have this vision in our day-today lives in all of our countries.”
– Maude Barlow




Bertha Lujan (right) “The possibilities for change are within our hands.”
– Bertha Lujan

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

A report by the Council of Canadians

PART III: WHAT WE HEARD

Panel 4: The North America We Want

After spending an entire day discussing the kind of North America that we don’t want to see, we figured it was time to present some positive, progressive alternatives to the Security and Prosperity Partnership. We convened a discussion moderated by veteran activist and broadcaster Judy Rebick, featuring Bertha Lujan, Minister of Labour for the Legitimate Government of Mexico, Antonia Juhasz, author of The Bu$h Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time, and Maude Barlow, the Council of Canadians’ national chairperson.

“Without a vision of what we want – the kind of world we’re fighting for, we’re not going to be able to mobilize to defeat what they’re bringing down on us. Being against is not enough – we have to know what we’re for,” said Judy Rebick.

Rebick’s comments served as an apt introduction to Bertha Lujan, as both women are experienced activists who, along with Maude Barlow, were involved in the fight against the FTA and NAFTA in the 1980s and 90s.

Lujan began by comparing the Integrate This! teach-in to similar forums that she attended in the years leading up to the signing of NAFTA.

“Now, as was the case then, we find ourselves facing a process that is very secretive and that we need to shed light on,” she said. “From the point of view of Mexicans, the participation of Canadians [in the struggle against NAFTA] was key … we learned from Canadians about what it meant to organize around this kind of agreement.”

Picking up on Peter Julian’s comments from earlier in the afternoon, Lujan addressed some common myths about the impact of free trade in Mexico. While NAFTA’s fans are quick to suggest that the agreement has brought prosperity to Mexicans, Lujan maintains that it’s only the “multi-millionaire business leaders of large corporations” that have profited. Meanwhile, “real salaries for people in all three countries continue to slide, and so does employment.”

She argued that one of the aims of the Security and Prosperity Partnership is to convince Mexico to abandon the exemption that it has from the proportional sharing clause in NAFTA. Canada is not exempt from this provision, and as a result, we can never reduce the proportion of oil and gas that we ship to the United States. For Lujan, there is a clear connection between the U.S security agenda and the government’s “bottomless, endless greed” for more energy resources.

“I would like to remind you all of what we said [when NAFTA was being negotiated],” she said. “We wanted sovereignty in terms of our foreign policy … the profound conviction of all nation states to not recognize any other power as greater than their own. It’s a desire for equality and for freedom. It’s a demand of countries and of nations in a context of liberty and respect … [What] we said back then was that we wanted justice – both social and economic – between countries and within them.”

Lujan’s vision for a more just relationship between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico includes a focus on workers’ rights and the recognition of autonomous legal systems for First Nations’ peoples. It focuses on sustainable economic growth “that is respectful and mindful of future generations,” promoting fair trade, rather than unfettered free trade.

“If we are not reminded of our history, we are bound to repeat our mistakes,” said Lujan. “The possibilities for change are within our hands. For those who have doubts about the possibility of our victory, we need to say the following: we need to do now what we can do now, with what we have, and go as far as we can with that.”

According to Antonia Juhasz, we shouldn’t be spending too much of our energy trying to construct an alternative vision for North America. Because she’s convinced that “we actually know very, very clearly what we want. We want worker rights and protections, we want human rights and protections, we want indigenous rights and consumer rights, we want economic justice, environmental justice, economic equality, we want sovereignty, and we want democracy. We want unity. We know all of these things, and we have articulated them very well.”

While the United States government may be spending trillions of dollars on the war in Iraq, Juhasz is optimistic about ability of social justice activists to challenge the SPP.

“We have been very successful in challenging their other modes of pushing their agenda,” she said. “They established the North American Free Trade Agreement, and sought to expand it through the Free Trade Area of the Americas. What happened to that agenda? They failed! Is there a Free Trade Area of the Americas? Is it being negotiated anymore? No, absolutely not. It’s a failure. And it’s a failure because of our organizing and resistance … The IMF and the World Bank have never been weaker than they are right now. Countries are refusing to contribute money. Countries are refusing to pay back loans.”

According to Juhasz, the Bush administration “is still operating under the idea that it can use 9/11 to justify anything and everything.” But she is confident that the tide is turning amongst U.S. voters. She pointed to the fact that in the 2006 mid-term elections, many Democrats ran and won on a platform of fair trade versus free trade. This is no small achievement, given that former President Clinton was the “father of NAFTA and the WTO.”

“This is a fundamental change,” Juhasz said. “And this is because of a social movement push in the United States.”

Maude Barlow ended the day by underscoring the Council of Canadians’ demand that the Security and Prosperity Partnership be brought to the public for a full debate.

“These people do not have the mandate to be moving ahead with an agenda by stealth, to fundamentally and radically change the face of North America in the image of the big business community, to confiscate the working people, the resources, the social security, the civil rights, the human rights of people in the Americas for their agenda,” she said. “They have not taken it to Parliament, and we would not give it to them if they did.”

For Barlow, the corporate sector’s vision of North America stands in marked contrast to the alternatives being brought forward by civil society.

“We live our alternatives,” she said. “We know what the alternative is to their kind of greed, and we know that in their system, the economy confiscates people and communities to work on behalf of the global economy. We think it should be just the opposite. The economy should serve communities and people, and we will not rest until we have this vision in our day-to-day lives in all of our countries.”

“We are calling for a full moratorium on the Security and Prosperity Partnership,” she continued. “We are saying disband the unholy alliance called the North American Competitiveness Council, which has companies like Lockheed Martin and Wal-Mart dictating the future of the peoples of the Americas. We are saying that we need to have a full debate with all sectors of society to determine what kind of future we want for our shared continent, because of course we want something together.”

Barlow encouraged the participants at the Integrate This! teach-in to work with partners in all three North American countries to defeat the SPP:

“The environment crosses all of our borders. Rivers, animals and air and cultural diversity and our ideas and our people travel. And we want to share something very, very fundamentally different. And we want our voices part of this process,” she said.

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