[R-G] Is this the end of NAFTA?

[shniad at sfu.ca]

http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/news/editorial/story.html?id=e2
7e5056-151a-4cb4-8b0b-1ec1946f3b9b
Vancouver Sun	  Friday, August 19, 2005

Is this the end of NAFTA?

Chasing the utopian dream of secure access to the U.S. economy has left
Canadians holding a bag of ashes
 
By David Orchard
Special to the Sun

Saskatoon - For two decades, those of us critical of the Canada-U.S. Free
Trade Agreement, and the successor North American Free Trade Agreement, have
pointed out that these deals didn't give us free trade, but would cost us a
large part of our sovereignty and national well-being.

Today, even promoters of the FTA as a "rules based" nirvana of "secure
access" to the U.S. market -- and part of a move toward global "free trade"
-- have been forced to face hard realities.

A couple of recent examples deserve examination. Recently, the China
National Offshore Oil Co. (CNOOC) was forced by what it called
"unprecedented political opposition" in Washington to withdraw its
open-market bid to buy the Union Oil Co. of California (Unocal.) Congress
saw the deal as a threat to American "energy security." U.S.-based Chevron
is now almost certain to pick up Unocal -- for a substantially lower bid
than that offered by CNOOC.

Canadians, on the other hand, living in a larger, colder country with a
critical dependence on energy, have signed away under the free trade
agreements our energy security and -- even though our industry is far more
foreign-controlled than that of the U.S. -- are told repeatedly by the
government that we have no need any more to own or control our oil and gas
reserves.

While both other NAFTA countries -- the U.S. and Mexico -- have national
energy policies focused on support for domestic ownership, last fall our
finance minister, Ralph Goodale, told us it was time for Canada to get out
of the energy business. The government announced the selloff of its
remaining Petro Canada shares at the bargain basement price of $64.50 -- a
fire sale begun in 1991, when shares now pushing $100 were sold for $13;
more followed in 1996 at $20.

Last week in British Columbia, in the biggest foreign takeover since the
2002 buy-up by South Carolina's Duke Energy of Westcoast Transmission,
Texas-based Kinder Morgan picked up Terasen -- B.C. Gas before it was
privatized -- the province's largest natural gas distribution company and
the biggest private sector provider of water services in Western Canada.

All of Terasen's pipelines, refineries, oil, gas and water operations are
included in the deal, essentially stripping B.C. of domestic control of its
energy.

At a time of unprecedented energy hunger, as countries around the world
scramble to secure energy supplies, and our prices escalate, Canadians are
treated to a continuing mantra about how we should be pleased that
foreigners are buying up our energy industry and reserves.

Federal Trade Minister Jim Petersen recently expressed satisfaction: "I
would not be surprised if people from around the world wanted access to our
energy or saw our energy companies as very good investments."

While spending billions and passing sweeping laws supposedly to protect
against terrorist threats, real or imagined, our government is doing nothing
to maintain domestic control over our rapidly dwindling non-renewable
reserves of oil and natural gas, leading to the predictable and very real
threat of skyrocketing energy prices to Canadian industry, agriculture and
consumers.

While the so-called free trade agreements handed Canada's ever more valuable
energy over to U.S. industry through the forced proportional sharing and
pricing clauses of the FTA (which Mexico refused to sign), did we get the
secure access and rules based regime that made it all worthwhile?

Maybe we should ask the lumber industry. After the U.S. has repeatedly
ignored FTA and NAFTA rulings in Canada's favour, where are we? A U.S.
tariff has netted $5 billion. The U.S. response to the latest NAFTA panel
ordering it to get rid of the tariff and return the $5 billion to Canadian
producers has been a yawn and a succinct rejection.

In a further mockery of free trade, under U.S. law, money from the tariffs
collected by the U.S. is distributed to the companies initiating the
challenges against Canada's industries -- incentive for American companies
to continue targeting Canadian exports and attempting to impose tariffs on
them.

Chasing the utopian dream of secure access to the U.S. economy has
devastated our livestock industry and led to almost total U.S. ownership of
our meat-packing capacity and to repeated U.S. trade challenges and
unprecedented tariffs on our grain and lumber.

It has seen close to 20,000 Canadian companies, including the ownership of
entire industries, move into U.S. hands in the past two decades, and left us
holding a bag of ashes instead of reaping the rewards of our abundant energy
supplies.

It is clear that the U.S. has pulled out of NAFTA. This means our energy
resources are once again ours, as is our ability to determine our course in
the world.

We have everything we need to do so, except political leadership not afraid
to give Canadians a direction of which we can all be proud and which will
provide real security in times ahead.

David Orchard is the author of The Fight for Canada -- Four Centuries of
Resistance to American Expansionism, and ran for the leadership of the
federal Progressive Conservative party in 1998 and 2003.

davidorchard at sasktel.net