Stuart Trew, Ottawa Xpress, November 3, 2005
Council of Canadians founder digs deeper into the selling out of Canada's sovereignty

"I told you so" is in order for Maude Barlow. After 20 years of telling Canadians that free trade with the United States will screw us, it's finally impossible to keep the evidence out of the papers. The U.S. has ignored a binding NAFTA ruling that says its tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber are illegal, making a joke out of the entire free trade agreement. Canada's Supreme Court has just opened up public health insurance to private (and American) competition thanks to another NAFTA clause. And the bulk of our remaining natural gas supply is slated for powering the extraction, by U.S. oil companies, of Alberta's plentiful crude reserves currently locked in the province's tar sands. This means burning one fossil fuel to extract a different fossil fuel, 60 per cent of which, under NAFTA, must go to the U.S. Not exactly a hit with voters, which is probably why it's never an election issue.

Barlow helped found the Council of Canadians, a group which tries to look after vital Canadian interests when the government doesn't.

"Our official position has been and still is to abrogate (NAFTA) but frankly up until the latest softwood lumber dispute there wasn't any political will, including any political party that was willing to take that on, so it's kind of like beating a dead horse," Barlow told XPress in a recent interview.

"But now we've got a new opportunity to talk about NAFTA."

Barlow has seized that opportunity with a new book called Too Close for Comfort: Canada's Future Within Fortress North America. Though not exactly an "I told you so," it describes a disturbing NAFTA scenario in which the Canadian government is speeding through environmental, legal, military and health-related policy adjustments to bring our standards and procedures in line with those of the increasingly self-destructive Bush administration.

The process is called "deep integration" by corporate types, and it's being carried out unchallenged and quietly at the convoluted and boring departmental level, supported by Liberals and Conservatives alike.

"What stunned me, and what I only suspected but couldn't prove until I wrote the book and did the research, was just how many cross-border working groups and committees and task forces are already in existence, moving this agenda along," Barlow said of the bureaucratic love-in virtually merging our two countries.

"Of course, one of the major concerns that I talk about in the book is that we're not just harmonizing with any old administration; we're harmonizing with George W. Bush, arguably the most right-wing, pro-military, anti-environmental, anti-citizen-rights, anti-social-rights presidents in the history of the United States."

This is a man, added Barlow, who has "taken environmental and regulatory reform four or five decades back ... whether you're talking about seed and food safety, or drugs and chemicals, or enforcement of environmental rules for big industries like mining and energy and defence. I mean these corporations are going to be given the kind of power to dictate their own policy under this new system that now exists in the United States." Environment Canada is currently drafting new U.S.-friendly policy with the help of top industry CEOs whose companies will be able to dodge regulations that will still apply to the little guys.

A CORPORATE AGENDA

Though ongoing for some time, writes Barlow in Too Close for Comfort, the process of deep integration was sped up post 9/11 at the request of Canada's business lobby (specifically the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, which represents the country's top-grossing companies). In late 2001, the Canadian government agreed to create a "smart border" with the United States that recognizes that "public security and economic security are mutually reinforcing." The Department of Foreign Affairs' language was taken virtually word for word from CCCE policy suggestions. But deep integration means much more.

When CCCE boss Tom d'Aquino headed to Washington in April 2003, Barlow writes, a group of Republican cronies, including Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle and former homeland security chief Tom Ridge, told him that continued access to the American market would require pushing NAFTA much further towards the creation of a common security perimeter around North America.

Ballistic missile defence was to be a key part of that perimeter, so Prime Minister Paul Martin's reluctance to agree to it was deeply disturbing for the CCCE and most of the media. (An amendment to NORAD has actually cemented our participation at the technical level.) If you want to know why we all know so little about deep integration, you've got the press to thank, said Barlow.

"The decision on ballistic missile defence ... showed that the vast majority (two thirds) of Canadians supported [Martin's decision] but it was almost universally condemned by editorialists in all the papers and the maze of private radio and television stations as well."

The Globe and Mail and National Post were 100 per cent behind Bush's Star Wars plan. As Barlow explains in Too Close for Comfort, even the Globe's Lawrence Martin could see this was proof, in his words, that, "Today's press ... has become concertedly conservative, moving to the right of the population."

Missile defence was also smiled upon by 85 per cent of corporate Canada, Barlow told me. In fact the entire project of deep integration is proceeding almost completely at the request of hard-right lobby groups like the Fraser Institute and the C.D. Howe Institute, as well as the CCCE. Martin comes straight out of this crowd and his ears are wide open to any advice, especially from d'Aquino.

This spring, at a mostly secret meeting in Waco, Texas, Martin, Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox signed almost all of the business elite's recommendations on further harmonizing the three governments' trade, security, agriculture and environmental regulations into what they called NAFTA-plus. If the right-wing business lobby gets its way, Canada, the U.S. and Mexico will be represented at international trading bodies like the WTO as a single continental bloc.

DANGEROUS PEOPLE POWER

The French and the Dutch governments recently put a similar proposal for a market-oriented European constitution to their populations and lost. So why are regular Canadians being kept out of the process?

"I think what [the corporate lobby] learned was that they almost lost," the very public free-trade debate of the late '80s, Barlow said. "They realized that they made a mistake ... that the majority of Canadians are still small 'S.D.' social democrats ... [The CCCE knows] that, they can read the polls as well as anybody. So they're not going to take a chance again of having a great big debate and a great big splash."

For her part, and that of the Council of Canadians, Barlow wants to see a moratorium on all further cross-border communications with regard to deep integration until there has been a more open debate in Canada. She especially wants it discussed in the looming federal election. But even then, she hinted that a "big splash" on the progressive side could spell trouble.

"I do think the Bush administration would consider it an act of war if Canada said we're tearing up NAFTA, even though the United States essentially tore up NAFTA by refusing to abide by the softwood lumber ruling," Barlow said. "So my caution is that we would take this in steps."

Her next step is a cross-Canada speaking tour to plug her new book. It begins at the Westin Hotel this weekend at the 20th annual general meeting of the Council of Canadians. Barlow will speak Friday November 4 as a keynote speaker, alongside Roy Romanow, former premier of Saskatchewan and head of the Commission on the Future of Healthcare in Canada. On Saturday delegates will look at how deep integration affects Canada's energy, health care, food and drug, and water regulations. More info at: www.canadians.org.

HISTORY OF DISSENT

Maude Barlow helped create the Council of Canadians (which she now chairs) in 1985 to battle Brian Mulroney's Free Trade Agreement with Ronald Reagan. Despite a majority of Canadians (and the Liberal party) opposing the deal, the Conservative minority passed the FTA in 1988. Undeterred, and with public opinion on her side, Barlow kept the organization together to try and block the FTA's expansion into Mexico-the North American Free Trade Agreement. Despite winning an election by running against it, the Liberals ratified NAFTA in 1994.

Since then, the "anti-free trade crusader," as the media often call Barlow, has helped block the Multilateral Agreement on Investment that would have allowed corporations to sue any government on Earth if national laws hurt profits. She most recently won Sweden's Right Livelihood Award for her and Tony Clarke's "exemplary and long-standing worldwide work for trade justice and the recognition of the fundamental human right to water."

Too Close for Comfort is available from McClelland and Stewart in paperback ($19.99, 312 pages, ISBN: 0771010885).