The Canadian | 21 June 2008
Canadians can restore their rights and freedoms by cancelling NAFTA
by Peter Tremblay
The selling of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to Canadians was based upon a basic fundamental lie. That lie is that there was no free exchange of goods and services between Canada and the United States until the late 1980’s Free Trade Agreement (FTA), that spawned NAFTA. Canadians have accordingly been conned into a belief that the cancelling of NAFTA would result in the subsequent collapse of the Canadian economy.
The truth of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of trade between the United States and Canada, under international multilateral agreements, was already ’free’ before FTA. The documentary film, Hoodwinked: The Myth of Free Trade, provided that insight, and also revealed the true agenda of FTA and NAFTA. Indeed, NAFTA was not intended by its architects to inaugurate "free trade".
NAFTA also boils down to a question. Do you think that as Canadians, we ought to be able to control our own economic destiny, as co-owners of our society, who share democratic rights and freedoms. Or alternatively, do you think that a clique of transnational corporations that make decisions in various boardrooms across the United States, should control Canada?
Should Canada be controlled by Canadians, or should Canada be controlled by interests that are linked to the U.S. political-military-industrial complex? Canada’s participation in the War in Afghanistan under U.S. command, is the result of these interests gaining control of our military, and is away from Canadian desire to participate in human rights peacekeeping operations. Indeed, a Globe and Mail frontpage article published on 19 June 2008, confirmed a report that The Canadian had published last year. Canadians are there to defend a $7.6-billion natural gas pipeline, in order to help make lots more money for U.S. controlled Petroleum interests.
FTA, as former Liberal leader John Turner had observed in the 1988 Federal Election, is really a legal Agreement, designed to enable two operations. The first operation. is to enable elite owners of U.S. Big Business interests to take over vast segments of the Canadian economy. In the process, this denies Canadians control over their own economy. NAFTA also enables a new "corporate-inspired constitutional framework". This framework is designed to create a system of public policy that is biased to the greed-driven commercial profit-making interests of elites.
The NAFTA framework marginalizes human rights, social justice, environmental protection, and other quality-of-living oriented considerations. Cancelling NAFTA, would therefore not undermine Canada’s free trade with the United States. Cancelling NAFTA rather, would simply liberate Canadians to take-back control of their own economy. In the process, Canadians, for example, would be able to once again create the kinds of public policies that led to far less poverty, including homelessness in Canadian cities. Canadians would in general, be able to inspire a government that could create public policies free of legal reprisal concerns under the neo-colonial NAFTA regime.
In 1982, many elites were upset at former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, championing constitutional repatriation from the United Kingdom, in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Many elites were outraged at the documents empowering Canadians to defend their vital rights, against the arbitrary exercise of elite power. FTA during the Brian Mulroney government, and NAFTA was an elite orchestrated response, not to "free trade", but instead, against the Canadian Constitution, as the legal embodiment of our national identity, as a sovereign Canadian people. "Free Trade" was the chosen to frame pro-FTA rhetoric, in disguise of a mass deception strategy coordinated by confederates on both sides of the border.
The apparent "cancer" of NAFTA against Canadians has now most recently morphed into the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), that was illegally endorsed by the Paul Martin government in 2005, without and constitutionally required consultation with Canadians through Parliament. The SPP, in turn, is being used to further illegally create a North American Union (NAU), through the SPP, as a secretively arranged fascist edict.
Canadians who seek to restore their rights and freedoms which they may have noticed the erosion of, since the late 1980’s, may wish to consider focusing their efforts on the cancelling of NAFTA, and its further cancerous legal incarnations, in the form of the SPP and the NAU. The alternative scenario is to say goodbye to universal public healthcare, goodbye Canadian labour rights, relative to Americans anti-union standards; goodbye any chances of saving our environment from further senseless destruction; and goodbye Canada as a nation, and our birthright/citizenship rights as Canadians. The fulfillment of our national destiny of Canadians, as a citadel of a socially progressive democracy, to inspire other nations, relies on raising public consciousness toward the cancellation of NAFTA.