'Three amigos' agenda tamer than initially planned

Much of meeting 'isn't very interesting,' Harper official says

Richard Foot
CanWest News Service

Monday, August 20, 2007

OTTAWA -- Despite all the fancy talk, the diplomatic pomp and the apocalyptic protests that will emanate over the next two days from Montebello, Que., the drab facts behind the summit of leaders from Canada, the United States and Mexico are far less dramatic than the grandiose meeting might suggest.

Regulations over food-colour dyes, common standards for hazardous materials containers, navigation systems for North American airways -- these are some of the bureaucratic measures why Prime Minister Stephen Harper will spend the next two days huddling inside the world's largest log cabin with U.S. President George Bush and Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

"A lot of it," admitted one of Harper's officials last week, "isn't very interesting."

This week's gathering inside the cedar walls of Chateau Montebello was initially intended as a political pit stop on the road to a stronger North American economic union.

In 2005, Paul Martin, Bush and then-Mexican president Vicente Fox met in Waco, Texas to launch the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), an initiative aimed at deepening the integration of the three countries, forging a common customs area and labour market, and in the wake of the security threats posed by 9/11, making sure North America's internal borders remained as free and efficient as possible.

That same year, an independent report authored by an elite group of intellectuals from all three nations said the limited scope of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement was in urgent need of renewal.

It said a more genuine economic and security union was essential if Canadians, Americans and Mexicans hoped to compete and prosper against the economies of China, India and the European Union.

Last year the North American leaders -- dubbed the "three amigos" -- met again, this time in Cancun, where already the grand ambitions of the SPP had been whittled down to aims such as smart borders and energy security.

But even those goals have been hard to achieve.

Earlier this year, negotiations broke off between Canada and the U.S. on a pilot project for a pre-clearance customs facility for trucks carrying cargo across an Ontario border crossing.

The facility was intended to improve transit times for cross-border cargo, but reports say the project was killed by nervous officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Critics of the SPP say the three governments are consulting only corporate leaders in the business community and ignoring everyone else -- scientists, labour leaders, human rights experts, police associations, environmentalists, even legislators.

Although the SPP hasn't generated huge reaction in Canada, it has become a lightening rod of fear and anger in the United States and a subject of debate.

Liberal critics say the process will endanger everything from labour to environmental standards.

"Canadians will have to adapt to having more pesticides on our imported foods as Canada harmonizes -- raises -- the amount of allowable pesticides on imported fruit and vegetables to bring it in to line with U.S. and Mexican levels," says one statement released last week by a coalition of "citizen's groups" from all three countries.

Meanwhile, conservative critics say the SPP will erode national sovereignty and reduce wages and working conditions for domestic workers.

"President Bush intends to abrogate U.S. sovereignty to the North American union, a new economic and political entity which the President is quietly forming, much as the European Union has formed," says Jerome Scorsi, a U.S. author and conservative activist.

"What is the plan? Simple. Erase the borders."