Nov. 16, 2005 - Issue #526: Sex, Lust & Love

Heralding Maude

Council of Canadians founder Maude Barlow rolls through town to shed some light on the process of ‘deep integration&#

She’s been warning Canadians for nearly two decades that someday we would end up on the wrong end of a major free trade screw-job, so you could forgive Maude Barlow if she seems a little smug lately. After all, with the U.S. government having so blatantly ignored a binding NAFTA ruling which stated their tariffs against the import of Canadian softwood lumber were illegal, it’s become pretty obvious that the North American Free Trade Agreement is barely worth the (most likely Canadian) paper its printed on—so, surely, no one would fault Barlow for letting loose with a flurry of 20 pent-up years of finger-wags and I-told-you-so’s.

Luckily for us, however, Barlow is a far classier woman than that; besides, being right doesn’t give you license to rest on your laurels, and for the founder of our country’s busiest national advocacy group, the Council of Canadians, there are still many more battles to be fought in the quest to protect Canadian sovereignty. Sure, NAFTA has proven to be a big joke, but there’s little humour to be found in consequences of the agreement when it comes to Canada’s ownership over our own resources, our right to determine our own social and security policies, and where such dependence may be leading us in the future.

“The Council of Canadians said at the signing of NAFTA that to lock ourselves into to these kind of agreements, to give American companies the right to sue the Canadian government for trying to assert our sovereignty, to give away all our own energy, well, it’s just plain dumb,” laughs Barlow over the phone from her hotel room in Victoria, her latest stop on a cross-country tour promoting her new book, Too Close For Comfort: Canada’s Future Within Fortress America. “Nobody I know is against trade or trade agreements, but by locking ourselves into the agreement that we did under NAFTA, we basically put all of our eggs in the American basket, and we lost control over so many areas that we could be using as a lever right now, like energy. We’ve made ourselves way more vulnerable to America’s political whim.”

This vulnerability is something Barlow discusses in great detail in Too Close For Comfort, with particular attention paid to the ongoing process called “deep integration,” in which the Canadian government is currently capitulating to corporate interests in the U.S. and at home who want to bring Canadian social, environmental and social policies in line with what she considers to be a dangerous and reprehensible American administration. And worse yet, it’s all going on outside of the public forum; as average Canadians, we aren’t even getting a say.

Barlow will be visiting Edmonton this Friday (November 16) to give the keynote address at the Parkland Institute’s ninth annual fall conference, “The Alberta We Want.” Vue Weekly was recently given the opportunity to speak with Barlow; here are some excerpts from our conversation.

Vue Weekly: Ms. Barlow, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Now, in your latest book, you discuss the process of “deep integration” and its attempt to homogenize Canadian and American business and political trajectories with the ultimate goal for creating a “Fortress North America.” Obviously, not a lot of people have heard about this, and I wonder if you could explain exactly how this process is happening.

Maude Barlow: Well, that’s the most important question, really. When we had the debate about the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement and then NAFTA, it was all out there—there had to be debate, it has to be passed in Parliament. But the next phase of this process of deep integration is the partnership that was signed by [Mexican President] Vincente Fox, George Bush and Paul Marti n just this past March in Waco, Texas. It’s called the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, which calls for a continental common market with common passports and security, defensive “co-operability,” as they call it, common immigration and visa systems, as well as common regulatory standards for trade across borders. And common resources, so that the resources of the continent are not considered to be the resources of any particular country but belonging to whoever can afford to purchase them.

So this is a very, very far-reaching agreement; it’s one based on the model put forward by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, who are using the fallout from 9/11 to suggest that security is so important to the U.S. that we have to offer up all sorts of areas in which we maintain some sovereignty. But it’s modeled on what’s good for big business, not people; it’s kind of like creating the European Union but without any of the environmental or social or equality safeguards. We want a debate in this country; we think this issue is huge, and hardly anybody knows about it.

VW: So why do you think the average Canadian should be concerned with what’s happening?

MB: This agreement will affect all Canadians. It is about the harmonization downward to George Bush’s America of our social and environmental standards, of our food, health and safety regulations, our immigration and visa process, our security—and I think this is a huge loss of sovereignty for Canadians. Besides, we should be standing up against what he is doing in the world—but signing this partnership is basically saying, “well, what you’re doing is right, and we’re going to work with you to promote it.”

And they are a dangerous administration. One thing that I hope I was successful in conveying in my book is just how much George Bush is actually changing the structures of the United States, from healthcare to education to social security…. some presidents come in and don’t do anything, but very few presidents come in and make deep, fundamental changes in the American social and environmental fabric, and we need to be concerned with this. We need to say loud and clear that we’re deeply opposed to this and we’re going to find every way that we can to express our opposition.

VW: What would your organization propose Canadians do instead? What do you think of the suggestion that if the U.S. isn’t going to play nice, Canada should take its business elsewhere to China and India?

MB: Well, I think that the United States has abrogated NAFTA by doing what it did over softwood lumber, and I don’t think that Canada is bound by those rules any longer. Though I would be careful about running off to China to try to sell them what’s left of our energy; we have handled our resources very foolishly, and we’ve got to step back and make an assessment of our energy policy and where we’re going.

We (the Council) remind Canadians, as I do in the book, that almost 70 per cent of all our oil production is going to the U.S., and since as a consequence we’re running short, we have to import about half our oil back in. You know, if I was a corporate head and I hired a lawyer who signed an agreement like this, I’d fire them and sue for reparations.

However, that being said, I wouldn’t suggest that we should just stop sending oil to the U.S. tomorrow; I think that would be foolhardy and would anger Alberta terribly. But I do think we need to put a moratorium on oil shipments to the States until we can assess what we’re doing. We’re running out of oil and gas, and it’s a big, cold country; we need to be assessing these energy needs for ourselves.

It used to be thought when you said that that this was just, “Oh, Eastern Canada wants all of Alberta’s energy resources again.” But now I talk to Albertans and they’re equally worried about future energy needs.

VW: You know, it seems that for so long the political emphasis has been on the differences between Alberta’s and Canada’s wants and needs rather than the similarities. How does a group like yours get past the long-standing notions of Western alienation and the sense that whatever Canada wants is probably wrong for Alberta?

MB: I think that’s why I was asked to be the keynote for this conference, because I’m not an Albertan; I think the Parkland Institute wanted to highlight the notion that this wasn’t an East versus West concept, and I’m going to talk about what binds us, not what divides us.

I think ordinary Albertans want the same things as ordinary Canadians: good, stable jobs with decent pensions and a good future for their kids, and they want that based on something real. I’m going to be talking about an Alberta and Canada based on sustainability—and not just energy sustainability, but water sustainability, because I think they go hand in hand and we haven’t yet had nearly enough discussion about our water reserves in Western Canada.

Part of the problem historically is that the rejection of Manning and the Reform party and the fear of Harper have been seen as the rejection and fear of Western power. And that’s not it at all; I think Canada is afraid of their political views and what they would like to do, not Western power. People in the East have a deep respect for the vibrant growth in Alberta, B.C. and Saskatchewan; the West is on a roll. But the concern among thoughtful people is whether or not this roll is based on anything sustainable. V

Building a Vision: Fighting for the Alberta and Canada We Want in Fortress North America
Presented by Maude Barlow • Horowitz Theatre • Fri, Nov 18 (7:30 pm) • For more information, visit www.ualberta.ca/~parkland/conference/2005/cf05schedule.htm.

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