The leaders of Canada, USA, and Mexico will meet in Montebello, August 20-21, to continue planning their "Security and Prosperity Partnership" (SPP) project. This feel-good name disguises an eventual integration of Canada and Mexico into a continent-wide United States.

The process proceeds via agreements and treaties that bind the three countries - but without national discussion or elections. The agreements are structured so they don't have to be ratified by any legislature, or, if on occasion they do, each is presented as a stand-alone agreement. This meeting has received little comment from politicians and very little coverage in our media.

These meetings began in Waco, Texas, and continued most recently in Cancun, with Stephen Harper now representing Canada. The meetings receive press coverage-after the fact and with little context.

Canadian coverage of the Cancun meeting, for example, dealt with Mr. Harper clothing and how awkward he appeared on this, one of his first international meetings. There was talk of criminal matters in Cancun, but little was reported about the meetings, their purpose, and their immediate accomplishments.

Why all the secrecy, including official near-silence surrounding next week's meeting down the highway from us?

First, the topic is hugely unpopular in all three countries.

Polls shows Canadians want less integration, not more -- as in foreign firms buying up Canadian companies, or as in the support for Canada's exercise of sovereignty in the Arctic (against, for one, American ambitions).

Mexicans remain angry with the carnage caused their rural economy by Free Trade (NAFTA), and there are strong American fears that US jobs are going to low-wage zones in Mexico. Eighteen US states have passed resolutions against the SPP agenda in one form or another.

Second, this is a corporate-led initiative. It is the corporations in the three countries which want to see their dealings streamlined and who want to put all "protected" items in NAFTA on the bargaining table. Corporations are here making government policy.

Third, Canadians would object to removing protection of Canadian water from bulk export, intellectual property, and communications, including the media and financial businesses and banks.

Fourth, these negotiations are being undertaken by a fully discredited American president, a Prime Minister here who won only a minority, and a Mexican president widely believed to have won through fraud-he faces an alternative government at home as well as insurgencies in the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero.

None of these men have the legitimacy to negotiate such a loss of sovereignty.

The US Army will be in Montebello and, assisted by our federal and provincial police, will try to stifle dissent.

We in Aylmer, QC should not be mislead by mis-reporting and official scare tactics. More proactively, we can participate and make our views known (check cpoutaouais@gmail.com for details on the noon hour, August 20, demonstration in Montebello). And we certainly should remember this SPP scheme at the next federal election.

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Copyright © 2007 Fred Ryan/Log Cabin Chronicles/08.07