“This is communication by stealth, and its watch words are oil and war, dressed up as energy strategy and security.”
– John Foster





Maureen Webb “The business community and the government are working hand in glove. And they’re implementing measures lockstep with the U.S. government. But it’s all being done incrementally – this is the genius of it.”
– Maureen Webb

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

A report by the Council of Canadians

PART III: WHAT WE HEARD

Panel 1: The Big Business of Insecurity

When we brought this panel discussion together, we wanted to hear about how the definition of “security” has changed since September 11, 2001. Why Canada is integrating its security and immigration policies with the United States and what are the risks of such cooperation? Why is corporate Canada intent on trading Canadian sovereignty for greater access to American markets? Why has the SPP not been debated by any government? And why does the corporate sector have a formal role in the SPP where there is none for civil society?

Moderated by Avi Lewis, this discussion featured Dorval Brunelle from the Université du Québec à Montréal, John Foster from the North-South Institute, Maureen Webb from the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, and Hassan Yussuff from the Canadian Labour Congress.

“I’m here because I believe that it is a pivotal moment for us as North Americans – as Americans, and I use that in the sense of the Americas,” said Lewis, pointing out that there’s been “lots of ink spilled over foreign takeovers of companies,” but very little media coverage of the Security and Prosperity Partnership. He said that what the social justice movement needs is “rigour, not rhetoric,” when it comes to fighting policies of this nature.

“There is a kind of thriller unfolding, as you connect the dots of these bland-sounding policy agendas and papers, and understand what they mean for your lives,” he said.

Dorval Brunelle started off the discussion, by pointing out that the SPP has its roots in the North American Free Trade Agreement, “the template, the granddaddy of all trade agreements.” While activists have spent the last couple of years decrying the secret working groups connected to the Security and Prosperity Partnership, Brunelle reminded us that NAFTA has set up more than 30 similar working groups since the mid-1990s, and that the SPP is merely an offshoot of a harmonization process that has already been underway for almost 15 years.

He also underscored the connection between the push for more Canada-U.S. integration and the U.S. Trade Act of 2002.

“You won’t believe this. Some parts of [the Act] are hilarious, and some are epic,” Brunelle said, explaining that the law assumes that “because the U.S. [thinks it has the best standards], they should force other groups to adopt them.”

Brunelle sees the Security and Prosperity Partnership as the executive branch of the U.S. Congress, acting under the radar, “so parliamentarians in Canada and Mexico don’t know of the origin of the reforms.”

“I think that the main point that we need to look at is trying to break through that democratic deficit and beyond that, the information deficit … it is absolutely immoral that this should be done by stealth, that this should be done in an occult manner, and furthermore that this should be done in cahoots between two actors which are government and business,” said Brunelle.

John Foster echoed Brunelle’s concerns about the secrecy of the SPP implementation process, focusing specifically on the North American Competitiveness Council. Foster wondered aloud how “unhealthy and weak our democracies are if we are permitting and tolerating unique and privileged access for a group of powerful and overpaid corporate CEOs … to advance agendas that will change the face of the continent and how it has governed.”

According to Foster, “they have gained this position not only over our heads, but over the heads of our parliamentary and congressional representatives. And how inadequate are our media if they have not ripped the veil off of this process? Are we in fact sleeping through a corporate coup d’état?”

Foster referred to a meeting of the North American Forum that was held in Banff, Alberta from September 12-14, 2006. Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day was there, and so was and Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor. They met with U.S. and Mexican government officials and business leaders to discuss North American integration. The event was chaired by former U.S. secretary of state George Schultz, former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed, and former Mexican finance minister Pedro Aspe.

Despite the involvement of senior North American politicians, organizers did not alert the media about the event. The event was organized by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the Canada West Foundation, an Alberta think-tank that promotes, among other things, closer economic integration with the United States.

At the Integrate This! teach-in, Foster revealed that a recent Access to Information request uncovered that the Canadian government’s communications strategy for this meeting was to insist that the meeting was “private,” and that “participants were instructed to avoid direct media engagement.”

“This is communication by stealth,” said Foster, “and its watch words are oil and war, dressed up as energy strategy and security.”

Maureen Webb, author of the just-released book Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World, drew the connection between the corporate sector’s push for deeper economic integration, and the U.S. government’s obsession with security and surveillance after September 11, 2001.

Webb pointed out that since the border between Canada and the U.S. was briefly closed after 9/11, business leaders have become obsessed with ensuring that this never happens again. As a result, “the Canadian business community and successive Canadian governments have really been falling over themselves to give the U.S. what it wants.”

In March 2005, a tri-national task force chaired by former finance minister John Manley called the Independent Task Force on the Future of North America released a report – just in advance of the first meeting between Prime Minister Paul Martin, George Bush, and former Mexican President Vicente Fox. The Task Force’s report called for a North American security perimeter, harmonized immigration and refugee policies, synchronized terrorist watch lists and a joint passenger-screening program.

At the Integrate This! teach-in, Webb mused about how the report was amazingly prescient, given that all of these recommendations have been lauded (and some adopted) by the Security and Prosperity Partnership. But the close relationship between government and business when it comes to the SPP is no laughing matter.

“You can see how security policy is being made in this country,” said Webb. “There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors. The business community and the government are working hand in glove. And they’re implementing measures lockstep with the U.S. government. But it’s all being done incrementally – this is the genius of it.”

According to Webb, the U.S. government is using the principle of pre-emption to guide its security policies, and this is having a dramatic impact on Canada’s security practices.

“[Pre-emption] is dangerous in areas of security,” she said. “The idea is that risk needs to be eliminated to the greatest degree possible. And that means everyone needs to be evaluated as a potential suspect.”

Webb pointed to the Safe Third Country Agreement as an example. The agreement, which came into force in December 2004, designates the U.S. as a “safe country” for refugee claimants landing in the U.S. enroute to Canada. This means that, with only some exceptions, they are not allowed to claim refugee status in Canada – even if they were only stopping in the U.S. in an effort to make it to Canada.

This agreement had already been agreed to by the Canadian government in 2002, as part of a post-9/11 push to keep the border open for business – long before the implementation of the SPP. But as Webb pointed out, it signalled the beginning of a more cozy relationship in terms of security policy, which has been further cemented since the implementation of Canada-U.S. Smart Border Declaration and the SPP.

According to Webb, “our principles are at stake here – things like due process, presumption of innocence, the right to know the evidence against you and to respond, the right against unreasonable search and seizure, rights under data protection laws, rights of mobility and asylum rights – all of these rights go out the window in a preemptive model.”

Hassan Yussuff picked up on many of Webb’s concerns in his discussion of the impact of the SPP on Canadian workers. He spoke about how transportation workers in particular are being adversely affected by harmonized security policies. In some cases, they have been barred from working on particular contracts because of discriminatory U.S. security policies.

“We have to counter the hypocrisy and the building up of racist stereotypes that blame Muslim and Arab men for the instability in the world,” he said.

Yussuff also pointed to the fact that free trade has led to economic insecurity for Canadian workers, and that further economic integration would only make matters worse. According to Yussuff, despite the current tar sands boom in Alberta, only one out of six industrial jobs that were lost in Canada since 2002 have been replaced.

“The Security and Prosperity Partnership means increasing insecurity for workers all around,” he said. “In the past year alone, we have lost one in seven manufacturing jobs – almost 200,000 jobs gone. Almost half were union jobs,” said Yussuff. “The last time we saw job losses like this, our economy was in a total recession.”

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