THE RECORD
March 14, 2001

Fiat Lux

by Ed Deak

The Quebec City preparations, for the April Summit of the Americas, to officially start the already ongoing negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas, are well on the way. A 3 square km. block has been fenced off with a 10 foot high wire fence set into concrete. The whole police force of Quebec will be mobilized and trained on how to keep the politicians of the 34 American nations in peace and quiet from the anguished protest of their own citizens. A whole jail complex outside the city has been emptied to house 500 people who are expected to be arrested. All people living and working in the fenced off area are issued special identity cards, the sewers blocked off and patrolled.

The Canadian border guards are already enforcing the no entry orders against anybody who has been known to have taken part anywhere in the now weekly growing number of protests against the madness of globalization. Mr. Chrétien maintains that his government is on the right course and all who oppose his free trade policies are misinformed. The same goes for his Foreign Minister John "Competition" Manly.

It was Mr. Manly who took Canada into the planning of the ill fated Multilateral Agreement on Investments during his Trade Minister days in 1975. Every time Mr. Manly appeared in TV or in print he couldn't open his mouth without the word "competition" coming out of it somehow. His fanaticism has only been outdone by his successor Sergio Marchi, now Canada's Ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Geneva and the Chair of the ongoing General Agreement on Trade in Services negotiations. More on this later.

Although we're supposed to be a democracy, the text of both the FTAA and the GATS negotiations are kept in deep secret by all governments. As with the NAFTA, Chrétien hopes to sign them on the sly, then jump the results of his wealth and prosperity creating efforts on the unsuspecting public when it is too late to do anything about them. He learned a good lesson from the FTA negotiations of 1987-88, which the Mulroney government opened to the public, published the texts and almost lost the election with 57 percent voting against them. Still, Brian got his majority and we got our free trade in spades.

Within the last few weeks the Bloc Quebecois launched a Private Members Bill in Parliament demanding the opening of the texts of the FTAA negotiations. When it came to the vote all opposition Parties voted for the disclosure, but the Liberal majority defeated it. Not the public, nor even the elected Members of Parliament are entitled to read what a bunch of civil servants are deciding without any public inputs, or referendum.

The same happened in the USA where the anti-free trade movement is growing by leaps and bounds. The excuse is both cases was that all trade agreements are alike and our governments are not permitted to disclose the contents without the permission of all 34 participants. A very peculiar form of democracy, but typical of our corporate politicians pushing phony free trade which is neither free, nor trade, but a licence for multi-nationals to search, exploit and destroy in the sacred quest for unlimited profits.

However, the game is over when people are beginning to wake up and demand their rights all over the world. On Wednesday, March 7 a lawsuit was launched in the US District Court in Washington DC against the new Trade Representative Robert Zoellick by the Center for International Environmental Law, or CIEL, to force the opening of the discussion papers.

The US Trade Dept. refused to open the papers with the usual excuse about the permission of 33 other states and claiming Freedom of Information Protection on the grounds that they were "inter and intra agency communications protected by the deliberative process of privilege."

The lawsuit claims that if the papers are open to 33 foreign governments the interests of the USA are not protected by withholding them from it's own citizens. As Senior Attorney, Stephen Porter for the CIEL put it: "The USTR is negotiating binding rules that could effect the ability of the United States to protect the environment and human health. To hide what it is doing from concerned citizens is shameful for the government that considers itself the world's model of democracy. The USTR is willing to give these documents to 33 foreign nations, but not to the American public.
One way, or another, once those documents are either published, or leaked, I shall have them in my computer about five minutes later. As I had the secret MAI documents several months before our Members of Parliament received them from the governments. I offered them to our Reform MP Philip Mayfield at the time. Phil ran to his great leader Manning who, being a free trader himself, wasn't interested in making them public either.

Copyright (c) 2001, West's International