Stephen Harper-Stéphane Dion pro-New American Union pact works for Big Business interests and not Canadians

by Jenn Jones

The conservative minority government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper is pressing for "The Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement", which would enable a Canadian company to challenge laws in provinces that block the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA is a scheme that had been inspired by the Brian Mulroney Progressive Conservative government during the late 1980'sm to sell-out Canada to U.S. Big Business interests. Former Liberal leader John Turner who opposed Mulroney's Free Trade Agreement plans recognized that the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement was substantively about allowing U.S. Big Business to take-over the Canadian economy, and not about simply promoting free trade, which had largely already been operating between the U.S. and Canada.

Murray Dobbin, a Vancouver author and journalist critical of SPP, argued in an article titled, "The Plan to Disappear Canada – 'Deep Integration' comes out of the shadows," the secretive trilateral bureaucratic working groups organized under the auspices of SPP are "harmonizing" virtually every important area of public policy with the U.S., including "defence, foreign policy, energy (they get security, we get greenhouse gases), culture, social policy, tax policy, drug testing and safety and much more."

The proposed legislation would allow companies that believe provincial laws and regulations harm their NAFTA rights to demand up to $5 million in compensatory damages for each violation.

When fully implemented, Dobbin argues, "TILMA would allow challenges to the location and size of commercial signs, environmental set-backs for developers, zoning, building height restrictions, pesticide bans, and green space requirements in urban areas. It also would allow challenges to restrictions on private health clinics, halt stricter rules for nursing homes and almost certainly overturn the current ban on junk food in British Columbia schools."

The controversy over SPP broke into the mainstream in Canada last month when Conservative Member of Parliament Leon Benoit walked out of a House of Commons International Trade Committee hearing in protest to a leftist professor who wanted to air his objections to "deep integration" with the U.S.

The professor, Gordon Laxer, was about to explain to the committee his theory that SPP involves a U.S. grab of Canada's energy resources when Benoit adjourned the meeting and bolted out of the room, preventing the Canadian mainstream press from hearing and reporting the professor's arguments.

Professor Laxer has objected to the closed-door meeting roundtables of Canadian business and corporate elite held in Calgary by the Washington-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), as part of its "North American Future 2025 Project."

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