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March 3, 2008 Forget about Ian Brodie’s alleged phone call to the media regarding U.S. Democratic presidential hopeful Barrack Obama’s stance on NAFTA. How’s this for Canadian meddling in the upcoming U.S. elections? According to a new Canadian Labour Congress report by Teresa Healy and Shelia Katz, Canada’s proposed free-trade agreement with Colombia was a gift to President Bush, an attempt to defuse Democratic resistance to a similar deal in the U.S. “As the U.S. Congress began indicating to the Bush Administration that it would lose a vote on the Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement if it were submitted to the House, the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper turned his attention to free trade with Colombia,” write Healy and Katz in their report, “Under the Umbrella of U.S. Hegemony: Canada and Colombia Head Toward a Trade Deal.” The CLC authors cite Stephen Harper from a speech he gave to the influential U.S. Council on Foreign Relations last September: “In my view, Colombia needs its democratic friends to lean forward and give them the chance at partnership and trade with North America. I am very concerned that some in the United States seem unwilling to do that. What message does that send to those who want to share in freedom and prosperity?” (Italics theirs.) Bush later used the Prime Minister’s words twice to bolster his position on the U.S.-Colombia agreement, explains the CLC report. “If Canada were to pass a free trade agreement with Colombia at this point, it could seriously weaken Democratic opposition to the deal,” write Healy and Katz. “Yet, that is exactly what Prime Minister Harper seems to be aiming for and what Bush is counting on. The upshot of this sordid affair is that the Canadian Prime Minister has used his good offices to lobby the U.S. Congress on behalf of their own President and his unpopular trade policy.” Security and Prosperity for Latin America The CLC report draws the links between Canada’s new sidekick role in North America and the ongoing Security and Prosperity Partnership. “Since Canada joined the United States and Mexico in the Security and Prosperity Partnership in 2005, we have watched Canada give up all pretense of an independent foreign policy,” write Healy and Katz. “Increasingly, Canada follows the U.S. strategy of undermining Latin American solidarity by striking bilateral deals with countries identified by the Bush Administration as strategic. “Moreover, in this generation of negotiations, ‘trade’ and ‘investment’ deals now also include a ‘security’ aspect. In the current round of negotiations, the security of workers does not register as important.” That’s because Harper is charging ahead with a Colombian free-trade deal despite recorded human rights abuses under the current leadership of the La U party, claiming, in a reversal of his position on China, that trade should trump political and social considerations in Colombia. “In the past 20 years, 2534 trade unionists have been assassinated,” write Healy and Katz. “Since the present government came to power, 400 Colombian trade unionists have been murdered… To this point, 125 highly-placed political leaders have been linked to paramilitary death squads. Nearly all are either President Uribe's supporters or members of his political Party, La U.” Meanwhile, security of access to Colombian markets by U.S. and Canadian companies, and the adoption by the Colombian government of security policies favourable to the U.S.-led “war on terror,” are taking the SPP model further south, into Latin America. Like with the FTA and NAFTA before it, “The U.S.-Canada and the U.S.-Mexico relationships are the testing grounds for the new technologies through which the United States is extending its security perimeter through extra-territorial methods,” write Healy and Katz. Click here to access the full CLC report.
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