A trip through some blog posts has my neural pathways click-click-clicking! Be forewarned, this is a click-heavy post!
It all started with Alison@Creekside, talking about Stock Day and the hook-up with the Conference Board of Canada, Bell Canada, Microsoft and the RCMP for discussions on the server in the sky, that whacked-out plan for a surveillance society. It’s a plan which flows from the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), that nasty piece of work cobbled together by the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE – those poor, poor millionaires) and the Mexican Consejo Mexicano de Asuntos Internacionales (Comex, a group sponsored by Exxon Mobil, and boasting affiliation with none other than Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of Economics).
After civil society defeated the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), a piece on the path to North American Union, the CCCE worked with the CFR and Comex on another way of making change. They proposed, in 2003, the North American Security and Prosperity Initiative (NASPI) which identifed five key areas of work:
Wholehearted action on these began when the SPP agreement was signed by former Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin, US President George W. Bush and former Mexican President, Vincente Fox, in 2005. It has been lovingly tended by PM Harper, President Bush and Mexico’s President Calderon.
On my blogging journey, when I got to Larry Hubich‘s post discussing the Stephen Harper defence strategy that’s absent from the Conservative platform, I thought SPP. He sent me over to Owls and Roosters, for more on the $490,000,000,000 defence plan.
In the sidebar at OnR, I noted a piece about TILMA, the Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement that puts investment ahead of people. Get this! A re-elected Stephen Harper government would force TILMA on the provinces. From page 16 of Stephen Harper’s de-sweatered platform:
A re-elected Conservative Government led by Stephen Harper will work to eliminate barriers that restrict or impair trade, investment or labour mobility between provinces and territories by 2010… We hope to see further progress, but are prepared to intervene by exercising federal authority if barriers to trade, investment and mobility remain by 2010.
And guess where talk of labour mobility barriers first appeared.
Yup! The CCCE! It’s in the section on regulatory efficiencies:
- As part of this effort, three issues of significant sensitivity must be addressed: the use of trade remedies within a de facto integrated market; regulatory restrictions on access and ownership in major industries; and impediments to the mobility of skilled labour.
Given what’s happening on Wall Street right now, it would make more sense for Canada to race away from markets more integrated with the USA! But Steve, like Noah of the Old Testament, is staying the course. In fact, Canada should have run away from the North American integration a long while ago. That might have prevented 20 recent deaths. From the same regulatory/economic efficiencies section:
- With respect to standards, inspection and certification procedures, our two countries should be able to apply a principle of “tested once” for purposes of the Canada-United States market. Examples of such areas are the consumer and industrial goods sector, food safety and pharmaceuticals.
Food safety, huh?
But wait! There’s more.
I had to travel back to Alison@Creekside, in 2006, where she quoted a Maclean’s article (note the changed URL),
This is how the future of North America now promises to be written: not in a sweeping trade agreement on which elections will turn, but by the accretion of hundreds of incremental changes implemented by executive agencies, bureaucracies and regulators.
Incremental changes, huh?
One more bit from that Maclean’s article. Ron Covais, president of the Americas for the arms manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, and a former adviser to US Vice President, Dick Cheney, said of the 2006 SPP meeting, “We’ve decided not to recommend any things that would require legislative changes because we won’t get anywhere.”
Democratic process is such a pain, isn’t it?
Government by stealth; the Stephen Harper Party’s strength.
Can you stand more, dear reader?
Go ahead, watch this without me; I’ve had enough for one day!
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Crossposted at rabble.ca/election
the regina mom 