[R-G] Canada Up For Grabs - Murray Dobbin

[Tom Childs]

http://thetyee.ca/Views/2007/08/29/Canada/ 

Canada Up for Grabs
SPP: Opposition lining up. Montebello proved 'deep integration' should
be a big election issue.
By Murray Dobbin
Published: August 29, 2007
  

TheTyee.ca
Stephen Harper's behaviour around the NAFTA leaders' Security and
Prosperity Partnership summit was politically reckless, and he will pay
a price for it. The summit was really about the deep integration of
Canada with the United States, a major concern to anyone concerned about
Canada's sovereignty, our ability to manage our borders and regulate
trade and corporate behaviour.

Harper's dismissal of the demonstrators outside the Montebello summit
as "sad" and his condescending rejection of critics from every
opposition party leaves the impression that Mr. Harper thinks he is a
monarch, not a minority prime minister.

Even worse, Stockwell Day's outrageous fabrication after the Sûreté du
Québec admitted sending agents among the demonstrators: "They were being
encouraged to throw rocks.... That's the irony of this. Because they
were not engaging in violence, it was noted that they were probably not
protesters. I think that's a bit of an indictment against the violent
protesters."

There was no violence, no rock-throwing at the site of the incident --
not even the police make this claim.

But if Day and Harper believe they can continue to portray the SPP as
the jelly-bean initiative, they may be in for a nasty surprise. All the
opposition parties have taken a critical stand on the SPP and deep
integration in general. The NDP has been leading the charge for months,
and successfully flushed out the government on the issue of energy
security by forcing SPP hearings in the International Trade Committee.
New Westminster MP Peter Julian has been digging up dirt on the process
for over a year, and has identified a massive deregulation effort
involving some 300 public policy areas. Leader Jack Layton is making
speeches across the country on the issue.

Orchard's bounty

On the Friday before the summit, the Liberals got in the game in a
major way with a 14-page position paper -- courtesy, I expect, of
anti-free trader David Orchard. Orchard was the low-key kingmaker at the
Liberal leadership convention, delivering the win to Stéphane Dion with
his 100-plus delegates. The Liberal position paper, called "Strong and
Free: The Liberal Blueprint for the North American Leaders Summit,"
takes extreme liberties with the truth when it claims the Liberal
conception of the SPP "was one all Canadians could embrace." In fact,
Paul Martin's version of the SPP (he initiated it at the first summit in
2005) was every bit as insidious and secretive as Harper's. Nonetheless,
Dion has now staked out a new position: demanding complete transparency
in the process, identifying the Afghan war as part of the SPP agenda and
reiterating the party's position that the mission end in 2009, calling
for water exports to be taken off the table, and demanding the return of
Canadian Omar Khadr from Guantanamo. The energy issue -- the massive,
Kyoto-killing tar sands expansion -- however, was conspicuously absent.

The Green party's Elizabeth May also has a lot riding on the deep
integration issue, having stated several times that it will be the core
of the party's next election platform. The Greens held a counter-summit
in Ottawa, with their U.S. counterpart also taking a stand against the
SPP. The party is focusing much of its attention on the North American
Competitiveness Council -- the body of 35 corporate CEOs (the U.S. gets
15, Canada and the Mexico 10 each) that has been formally established as
the only non-government body making recommendations to the three
governments.

Even the Bloc has taken a critical stand, a reversal of the
sovereigntist position on free trade and NAFTA.

How the opposition parties decide to play the SPP and its critical
component parts -- the environment, energy security, Afghanistan, the
militarization of Canadian culture, water exports and the relentless
corporatism of the process -- in the next election remains to be seen.
The Bloc has already threatened to try to bring down the government over
Afghanistan. The NDP is extremely well placed to take the issue on, but
seems reluctant to make it the centrepiece of their electoral vision.
The Green party's intentions are good, but they have almost no resources
to carry them out. And the Liberals always run from the left, so their
"strong and free" document is likely to suffer the same fate as other
such promises (like Paul Martin's Red Book), even if does end up in
their platform.

Creating traction

Despite these positive signs, if the opposition parties believe deep
integration has little traction, they will drop it as an issue. So it
will be up to the social and environmental movements and organized
labour to make deep integration and the SPP the central issue of the
next election. That it should be the central issue seems obvious. There
is no better time to reverse 20 years of Americanization of Canada. We
will likely still have George Bush as U.S. president, a gift to Canadian
nationalists. The U.S. itself is in rapid decline by most measures, and
Canadians' alarm over global warming creates a perfect context for
challenging the power of oil companies to determine Canadian public
policy.

The Montebello summit, and the unprecedented exposé of police
provocateurs, marked the end of the secrecy phase of deep integration.
The parallel with the fight against the Free Trade Agreement of Brian
Mulroney is striking. Following years of secrecy, Mulroney and his Bay
Street cronies finally had to come out in the open and defend the
substance of the deal -- and they almost lost the 1988 election. But the
NDP got it wrong that time and Mulroney walked away with the spoils.
This time the stakes are even higher. Everyone will have to get it right
or we really will lose the country.