North American Union talks spark fierce debate in U.S.
Pastor Dale Morgan
North American Union talks spark fierce debate in U.S.*
Kelly Patterson
CanWest News Service
Saturday, February 17, 2007
OTTAWA -- A sweeping accord for the economic integration of Canada, the
U.S. and Mexico has unleashed a firestorm of debate south of the border.
Everyone from national congressmen and state legislators to bloggers and
YouTubers are raising the alarm about the Security and Prosperity
Partnership (SPP), a plan to harmonize the countries' economic and
security practices.
Criticism ranges from measured calls for stronger congressional
oversight to hysterical charges that the "treasonous" deal will flood
the U.S. with illegal aliens and terrorists.
"The deal will weaken the sovereignty of the U.S. It will create a North
American Union" similar to the European model, warns Representative
Virgil Goode, who, along with six other legislators, has tabled two
resolutions opposing the deal in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Canada will be in the eye of the storm next Friday as U.S. Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice and Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff
arrive in Ottawa to meet their Canadian and Mexican counterparts to
discuss the accord, in the lead-up to a summit of the heads of state in
Alberta this June.
The wide-ranging accord lays the tracks for the harmonization of
everything from immigration screening and terrorist watch lists to
drug-safety and consumer-protection regulations.
The SPP aims "to build a safer, more secure and economically dynamic
North America" says Melisa Leclerc, spokeswoman for Public Safety
Minister Stockwell Day.
But critics argue that the pact, brokered by U.S. President George Bush,
then-prime minister Paul Martin and Mexican leader Vicente Fox in 2005,
amounts to a set of backroom deals that bypass the democratic channels
of all three countries to avoid opposition.
Many of the accord's 300-some initiatives affect regulatory issues such
as visa-screening rules that are under the control of bureaucrats rather
than legislators.
Since January, legislators in six states have tabled resolutions
opposing the plan.
"A merger between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico would be a direct threat
to the national independence of the U.S. and an eventual end to national
borders," says Val Stevens, a Washington state senator who recently
filed a resolution opposing the pact.
Officials on both sides of the border strongly deny the charges that
they're engineering a North American Union.
"All three governments are sovereign democracies, and the SPP work is
the kind of standard intergovernmental diplomacy and co-ordination that
occurs all the time on various issues," said U.S. Department of Commerce
spokesman Matt Englehart.
Any steps that would require legal changes will be vetted by Congress,
Englehart adds.
The pact aims simply to "promote the safe and efficient movement of
people and goods" among the three trading partners, he says.
"That's nice government bureaucratese," scoffs Jerome Corsi, an author
and outspoken critic of the pact, pointing to the sheer scale of the
project, which involves scores of officials in all three countries.
"You don't need trilateral working groups that report directly to three
cabinet secretaries, the National Security Council and the president" to
do housekeeping tasks such as cleaning up Lake Erie, he says.
"The SPP puts in place an elaborate, robust structure" that "will be
permanent, and will ultimately ... produce a new set of North American
regulations that would supersede any regulations we have in Canada and
the U.S."
Corsi says Canadians should be concerned by this, too, noting that some
SPP documents refer to the Alberta oilsands "not as a Canadian resource,
but as a North American resource."
"What if you want to sell it to a country we (the U.S.) don't want it
sold to?" he asks.
But Robert Pastor, director of the Center of North American Studies at
American University and an influential proponent of economic
integration, says the SPP is no threat to sovereignty.
"The idea of a North American Union is impossible. ... There's no way
these national governments are going to be dissolved," he says, noting
that the relationships among the three nations are very different from
those in Europe.
"But we would be making a huge mistake we didn't learn from five decades
of European (economic) integration.
"We're better off the more we communicate with each other and work
together."
Nonetheless, John McManus, president of the patriotic John Birch
Society, says the European Union, which began with a common market and
regulatory harmonization, has all but wiped out national identity on the
continent.
"Last month, Roman Herzog, German president from 1994 to 1999, said 84
per cent of the legal acts in Germany stem from European Union
headquarters in Brussels.
"Then he asked whether Germany can still unreservedly be called a
parliamentary democracy anymore."
The Security and Prosperity Partnership is the "beginning of the end of
independence," he concludes.
"I would think Canadians want to stay Canadians, and here in America we
want to stay American."
Ottawa Citizen