Opening up the Security and Prosperity Partnership

By Stuart Trew
The Hill Times, February 19, 2007

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff will be in Ottawa on Friday, Feb. 23, to discuss the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) with their Canadian and Mexican counterparts. If you're a little fuzzy on exactly what this tri-national agreement entails, that's because except for an exclusive team of MPs and chief executive officers, you have been categorically left out of the discussion.

This is not an oversight. In fact, the SPP was designed to dodge Parliamentary or public debate so that its more than 300 recommendations on sector deregulation, policy harmonization, and security and energy integration between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico can be implemented fairly rapidly by the executive branches in each country. It's about making policy behind-closed doors. Or, in the words of a June 2005 SPP report, it's about "roundtables with stakeholders, meetings with business groups and briefing sessions with legislatures."

Since then-prime minister Paul Martin, U.S. President George W. Bush and then-Mexican president Vicente Fox ratified the SPP in March 2005, working groups comprised of bureaucrats and CEOs from all three countries have been integrating Canadian and U.S. policies around food and drug safety, anti-terrorism, the environment, immigration and energy, all without legislative review. Only those MPs whose portfolios touch the SPP directly–Industry, Public Safety, Foreign Affairs and International Trade–have been regularly included in tri-lateral discussions.

The private sector has fared much better. At the March 2006 SPP summit in Cancun, Mexico, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Bush and Fox created the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC), comprised of 10 CEOs from each country, to come up with a blue sky scenario for North American integration. Council members include representatives from Wal-Mart, Lockheed Martin, Merck, General Motors, Home Depot, Linamar and Suncor. It is expected that they too will converge in Ottawa this Friday to report on their recommendations for North American integration.

A top priority of the NACC is "energy integration." As we learned in CBC reports last month, this includes a five-fold increase in Alberta oil sands production. Canadians and most of their official federal parties seem intent on meeting Kyoto targets by significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Energy integration will make meeting those targets physically impossible.

But the SPP is clearly not about what the Canadian public wants. It's about shielding from public debate what corporate Canada wants.

Ron Covais, of Lockheed Martin, told Maclean's last September that the competitiveness council had "decided not to recommend any things that would require legislative changes... because we won't get anywhere." The obvious question is, why not? What are these CEOs proposing that has to be shared with a select few politicians behind closed doors?

One way to find out would be to attend the meeting between Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay, Rice and Chertoff this Friday. Of course, that's not an option for interested MPs or the public, who are supposed to be satisfied with after-the-fact "briefings" and what little we can glean from U.S. government sites like www.spp.gov and documentation by SPP-linked organizations like the Council of the Americas. That, in itself, should be enough to convince us to reconsider the integration agenda.

SPP documents from the Council of the Americas talk about "How to forge a more cohesive North American approach to the continent's relationship with the rest of the world as it relates to trade, competitiveness and security issues." This sounds a lot like a common foreign and international trade policy for North America, which would explain recent government efforts to re-brand the Canadian military as a fierce fighting force in the U.S. "war on terror."

Other SPP documents talk about the "creation of a genuine constituency of North America," which would eventually require "buy-in" from legislators who have been left out of the process so far. They discuss "the importance of business issues to the overall social welfare" but ignore the idea of public participation. Perhaps that has something to do with a private-sector request that they be allowed to "engage substantively and pragmatically on trade and security issues without undue deference to political sensitivities."

Consecutive Liberal and Conservative governments have been happy to grant this request to a handful of North American business leaders. Now it's time to open up the SPP to real public and Parliamentary debate.

Stuart Trew is a researcher with the Council of Canadians.

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