Secret Conference Ignored by Media

[skdadl]

The Con members on the trade committee dissented from the motion. Quislings.

 :evil:

What is it with these guys? If they love the power centres, why don't they just go there? Why do they have to betray real Canadians?

On a lot of lefty sites, I'm reading words like "traitor" and "quisling" more and more often these days. The anger at lying ruling elites is picking up momentum. I guess that's what we need, although it can leave you feeling really sick, yes?

[Alison]

I guess that's what we need, although it can leave you feeling really sick, yes?

Definitely. But isn't that why we blog? To "write it out"?
We're this century's pamphleteers.

I used to blog something I called Quisling Watch.
Time to start it up again me thinks.

[Toedancer]

But they're private businesses, Hol, and so not accountable to the electorate. :x

Garth Turner's take on SPP.

This posting will be the first in several on SPP, as my research and reading is far from complete. I have spoken to government officials, industry leaders, MPs and academics about this. There is a huge disparity in the quality, quantity and tone of the information resulting from those conversations. Like most Canadians, I am at a loss to know with certainty if this is a beneficial partnership for our nation to be so enthusiastically embracing.

And, in itself, that is disturbing. As an MP, I represent Canadian voters, so it would seem incumbent that all MPs would have a role in the design, approval or implementation of an agreement as profound as SPP. After all, we fought recent elections on trade deals – the FTA and NATFA – which would have far less impact on the lives of our citizens, and the independence of our nation. Governments rose and fell based on the chapter and verse of those documents.

And yet in the case of the SPP, we have no master agreement. No one document exists, but rather a mesh of partially-informative and often spin-doctored government web sites. Of greater concern is the rolling nature of this partnership. Ongoing task forces of indeterminate membership, meeting beneath the public radar, and deciding upon changes which are quickly implemented under existing regs.

That means no SPP motion or bill has ever come before the House of Commons. No extended debate has even taken place, while MPs spend hours on issues of much less impact on the entire country. There is no standing House of Commons committee on SPP and no extensive, publicized and well-promoted hearings. No questions are heard in QP on SPP, and no ministerial announcements are made when key meetings take place. No summary was ever given by PMSH on his pivotal Cancun SPP conference last Spring. No accounting. No words. Nothing.

For a century and a half, we have resisted the siren song of wealth and influence and cultural assimilation that union with the United States would bring. We have stubbornly set our own course, even when it meant paying more in taxes, doing with fewer innovations and making the costly and difficult choices of being a bilingual, multicultural, tolerant and largely pacifist nation.

Is that now changing? Not with a bang? Not even with a whimper?

As I indicated, I do not know what to make of SPP. That alarms me.

My voters did not send me to the capital to worry about railway crossing safety, the crab fishery, ABM fees or appointment terms for senators, while the independence of our nation was being silently and steadily eroded by the unelected. My job is not to jump to conclusions, or raise false alarms. It is simply to defend my country. It may well be time to do so.

Well he is at least talking to other MP's about it, yet none of them are discussing it with their constitutents. Let's see what else he reveals.

Oh just to let you know, the commens on GT's blog are terminally boring, not all but certainly 95% of them plus he has quite a problem with the 'afeared' conservatards.

http://www.garth.ca/weblog/

[Toedancer]

With the implosion happening in Ottawa, I pray the next election is not built on the equalization payments. But the environment and the SPP deal.

Found this about the Waterbank of America. Today's date.

In connection with the closing of the acquisition, the Company will obtain a Provincial Permit to extract more than 100,000,000 liters/year of water, timber assets consisting of more than 5,000 pine trees, and raw land exceeding one million square feet. The closing of the acquisition is subject to customary due diligence and conditions precedent.

The Company has received a number of awards, including two of the bottled water industry's highest awards from the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) for excellence in print and Internet presentation.

"We are very pleased with the recently signed Letter of Intent enabling us to move forward with the acquisition of the spring located in the Province of Quebec, Canada, which is the first step in our development program to acquire significant spring water source assets in North America," describes WaterBank new President and CEO, Michel P. Pelletier.

http://new.marketwire.com/2.0/release.do?id=741151

[Holly Stick]

So, John Ibbotson thinks we shouldn't get all hysterical about SPP.

..."The cruel truth is that the Security and Prosperity Partnership is sinking under its own weight," concludes Roland Paris, a professor of international relations at the University of Ottawa. Prof. Paris was an adviser to the Foreign Affairs Department and the Privy Council Office from 2003 to 2005, when the SPP was first launched.

"It takes a lot of political capital to move such an agenda forward where the sensitivities are so high. And that political capital just isn't there."...

I'd be relieved if I trusted Ibbotson's judgment.  As it is, I'll stick with the hysterics.

[skdadl]

Thanks for that, Holly Stick. Will fume at it first thing tomorrow morning.

[Alison]

Came over to leave a note about this earlier and saw that you guys are already on it. :)
Something alarming I'm seeing more and more often in the press lately - and Ibbitson does it here - is to first bring up the SPP and then debunk the NAU. This has the effect of conflating the two and even though both are about deep integration, there are distinct differences. SPP is a series of small bureaucratic *economic* shifts that is already going on ; NAU is a rightwing *political* conspiracy theory, which may or may not have credibility, but is not helped by being promulgated primarily by the John Birch Society, LouDobbs, and Phyllis Shlafly, all of whom think this is about race.
Josh whatshisname at Alternet did a somewhat confusing post about both, and in the 400+ comments that followed, only a couple of people realized this was primarily a framing issue and Josh was clearly not one of them!

[skdadl]

I guess what I need to do is bop on back to Creekside to straighten out my memories, Alison, but are there not sort of two tracks to SSP itself, the bigger if still semi-secret (at least closed) meetings like the Banff series and then a smaller group (that has a name?) of the planners -- like Manley -- who negotiate with full knowledge of their governments, almost at ambassadorial or ministerial level? And then the ministers do meet.

I hope I'm more vague than muddled.

[Alison]

Absolutely agree that SPP has both public and secret components, and it's logical to suppose that the parts kept secret are the most alarming parts.
This has been a leftists' issue in Canada - exposing that secret agenda as a tri-national corporate regulatory harmonization that contravenes political democracy. In other words - as an economic issue that also affects us politically.

But now the media here is waking up to how it plays as a conspiracy theory for xenophobic racist nutters south of the border, whose interpretation of SPP is that Jews and bankers are in a secret cabal pulling strings to allow immigrants from Mexico and socialism from Canada to wreck America, which will disappear under a some foreign flag. Leading proponents of this interpretaion like the John Birch Society always call this the NAU.

So now when the media up here mentions SPP, they also throw in a few choice bits from the NAU folks and lump it all together as one big conspiracy theory - "the lunatic not-so-fringe" as Ibbitson calls it.
This is the third Canadian print media article in the last two weeks to do this.

The danger here, as I see it, is that mushing Maud Barlow in with Jerome Swift-Boat-Veterans-for-Truth Corsi allows guys like Ibbitson to discredit the whole thing before we even get people to take it seriously. And people don't want to have to take it seriously.

I'm not saying the NAU-obsessed righties are wrong about everything - obviously they see their jobs going oversees and their economic well-being declining - but having the John Birch Society on our side here is not going to help us in the national press.

Does that make more sense?

[skdadl]

Oh, yes -- that makes perfect sense, and so well put. I should just blog you.

Hey, world! Serious issue. Read Alison.   :oops:  :wink:

[fern hill]

Linda McQuaig in the Star.

Continental integration on the march



Jul 10, 2007 04:30 AM
Linda McQuaig

It's a great irony that, while the United States has probably never been less popular among Canadians than in the era of George W. Bush, plans to integrate Canada more deeply into the U.S. have been proceeding at a brisk clip.

The threat of Canada being absorbed into the U.S. has traditionally provoked strong reactions here, as the pitched electoral battles over the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1980s and '90s attest.

But the issue seems to have largely disappeared in recent years, leaving the impression that the push for deeper integration has stopped or that Canadians no longer care about it. Neither is true.

[skdadl]

Thanks again, fern hill. Oh, I do not have time.  

[fern hill]

It's short, skdadl. She talks about 'relaxing' regulations on pesticides, for example. She promises future columns on security and sovereignty.

[GDKitty]

Hi Alison!  Is this the Alternet piece?
"Debunking the North American Union Conspiracy Theory"

I saw that a few weeks ago and whizzed right by it.  

Thanks for your incredible, continued digging on this stuff.

[Alison]

GD Kitty : The very same!
It's not a bad article - I shouldn't have been slaggy about it - but his embarrassment at sharing this issue with the racist righties who own it in the states throws the whole thing off.
 
I think we should frame it up here as government lying to us, rather than as a conspiracy - which just makes it too easy for them to dismiss it as tinfoiling.
I mean, no one calls the Afghan detainee issue a conspiracy, do they?
No, they call it lying. A much stronger position, imnsho.

Thanks kindly for your interest.