C
orporate and government leaders across North America have been busy since
the advent of NAFTA. Hardly satisfied with the current stranglehold of
corporate globalization over this continent, big business leaders have
pushed ahead the notion of a “deep integration” of U.S., Canadian, and
Mexican economic, security, military, and social policy.
Since 9/11, the United States has championed the Security and Prosperity
Partnership (SPP), an initiative launched at George W. Bush’s ranch in
Waco, Texas in 2005 by then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, Mexican
President Vin- cente Fox, and Bush. The SPP initiative, dubbed “NAFTA 2.0”
by one Canadian journalist, looks poised to move free market fundamentalism
into the era of national security paranoia.
In practice the secretive SPP initiative, due for further negotiations
this summer, effectively transfers control of things like state oil and
gas policy, industry regulation, and possibly even immigration policies
to CEOs of the continent’s largest corporations.
Ron Covais, North American president of Lockheed Martin and member of the
SPP-created North American Competitiveness Council, in describing the creation
of the council, effectively confirmed this last fall by openly stating
that “the guidance from the [government] ministers was, ‘Tell us what we
need to do and we’ll make it happen.’” The North American Competitiveness
Council is composed of CEOs of large corporations, including Bell Canada,
Wal-Mart, and General Motors.
Needless to say, the corporate- led plans of “deep integration,” as set
out in the SPP, have never been openly debated by an elected government
in any of the NAFTA countries. A key component of the SPP strategy, called
“Atlantica,” may serve as a regional prototype for further “integration”
of the continent.
Atlantica as Gateway
A
tlantica would link the Atlantic Canadian Provinces of Nova Scotia, Prince
Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland with Maine, New Hampshire,
Vermont, and upstate New York. Proponents of Atlantica—largely business
lob- bying groups—view this initiative as a plan to bring prosperity to
“have-not” regions on both sides of the border. The Atlantica plan encompasses
a harmonized energy grid between Atlantic Canada and New England, the development
of an “energy hub” in New Brunswick, and harmonization of transportation,
security, and military policy in key areas.
However, unlike other economic and security “gateways” on the West Coast,
Atlantica’s proponents readily admit that the initiative has little to
do with the exchange of goods and services produced between the U.S. and
Canada. In a speech during a conference entitled “Reaching Atlantica: Business
Without Borders” held in New Brunswick last June, Brian Lee Crowley, former
director of the business think tank the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies
(AIMS), explained that “within the global network, you must either be a
destination in your own right (like Chicago, London, Hong Kong, or Tokyo)
or you must be on the route to a destination.”
For Crowley, the key factor for the Atlantica “concept” is to ensure that
Atlantic Canada and New England act primarily as a transit point for goods
and services being trucked through the region. According to this vision,
the Canadian coastal city of Halifax would serve as an east coast “gateway”
for Asian goods traveling on cargo containers too large to cross the Panama
Canal, while the rest of the region would amount to an asphalt gateway
for goods traveling to Boston, Montreal, and New York. According to Sean
Cooper, executive director of the Atlantic Provinces Chamber of Commerce,
At- lantica will simply “move wealth” and, as a result, will apparently
“create wealth.”
Critics are less enthusiastic. In February the Canadian Centre for Policy
Alternatives (CCPA), a social policy think tank, released a report entitled
Atlantica: Myths and Reality
. The report’s author, Scott Sinclair, questioned
the notion that economic benefits will simply accrue as a result of this
“gateway” strategy. “I think that there’s something wrong with an economic
development strategy that’s based on turning the region into a conduit
for goods that are produced outside the region in Asia and are intended
to be consumed outside the region,” Sinclair argued.
The Atlantica proposal would require a harmonization of trucking legislation
in both regions to allow “truck trains”—multi-trailer transport vehicles
sometimes stretching up to 125 feet in length. The CCPA report argues that
this would bring greater costs associated with upkeep of the region’s highways
and would have negative environmental and public safety impacts. In addition,
the report argues that the advantages of this “trade corridor” have been
grossly overstated by Atlantica’s proponents. Most glaringly, the planned
expansion of the Panama Canal, due for completion by 2015, would eliminate
much of the strategic advantage of the Halifax port for the entry of Asian
cargo containers.
Energy
T
here are some aspects of Atlantica that appear to be already in place,
such as infrastructure around the oil and natural gas resources in Atlantic
Canada. Energy resources from such oilfields as Newfoundland’s Terra Nova
oilfield and Nova Scotia’s Sable Island are currently Atlantic Canada’s
biggest exports to the United States. The Atlantica initiative aims to
accelerate such exports to the ravenous energy market of the United States
on terms favorable to large oil and gas multinationals.
Such initiatives are not new for Canada. Currently, it stands as the biggest
energy supplier to the United States, due largely to oil and gas resources
from the Alberta tar sands. Yet, despite its enormous oil and gas resources,
Atlantic Canada and Quebec rely on imports for 90 percent of the petroleum
they consume. In addition, the main electric utilities in the region import
and burn coal, one of the most environmentally damaging sources of energy
on earth. Most of the natural gas reserves produced in Atlantic Canada
are currently piped to markets in large urban centers such as Boston, which
falls outside of the borders of the “Atlantica” region. By contrast, there
is no current infrastructure linking natural gas terminals in New Brunswick
with the rest of the Canadian Maritime region. NAFTA’s proportionality
clause effectively locks Canada in place as an energy colony to the U.S.,
by requiring that the Canadian industry cater to U.S. energy “needs” before
those of Canada.
However, Charles Cirtwell, president of AIMS, argues that the current policy
of shipping natural gas southward from Atlantic Canada is contributing
to environmental sustainability. He believes that the supply of Canadian
natural gas to New England has allowed the region to use liquid natural
gas as an energy “transition” while New England utilities adjust to using
more sustainable energy sources. He argues that without U.S. investment
in natural gas projects in New Brunswick, the resources would still be
untapped and New England consumers “would be burning oil.”
“From a green perspective,” says Cirtwell, “this kind of symbiotic relationship
has worked out quite nicely for everybody.”
But not everybody agrees that this energy strategy is environmentally sound.
According to Matt Schlobohm, a coordinator with the Maine Fair Trade Campaign,
“There’s very little recognition” among the proponents of the Atlan- tica
energy corridor of “the ecological crisis we’re in.” Schlobohm argues that
Atlantica fails to address the immediate need for a move to “a different
energy paradigm that’s based on much more sustainable energy production,
local energy production.” He sees little hope for the recognition of this
immediacy without more of a public role in determining the energy policy
on both sides of the border.
“What we’ve seen in Atlantica is a process that’s been entirely sha- ped
by the largest corporations in the region,” Schlobohm argues. “It’s been
a very exclusive process that hasn’t included labor unions, community organizations,
environmental groups, [or] indigenous organizations.”
Worker Tradeoffs
T
he key sponsors of the first “Reaching Atlantica: Business Without Borders”
conference in June 2006 were largely Canadian corporations such as JD Irving
limited and the Bank of Montreal. Atlantica’s critics outside the conference
far outnumbered its proponents. A coalition of environmental, labor, and
community organizations held a counter-summit and a demonstration of 400
people in the small harbor town of St. John drew key leaders, as well as
rank-and-file workers, from large unions such as the Canadian Union of
Public Employees, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, and the Canadian
Labour Congress. Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians, spoke
at the opening event of the counter-summit to a packed audience. Atlantica,
which had previously maintained a low media profile, became news headlines
in Canada after a group of 35 protestors attempted to interrupt a speech
by conference keynote speaker J.D. Irving.
Aside from the elite nature of the decision-making behind the Atlantica
process, much of the controversy around the initiative has focused on the
free-market zeal expressed by Atlantica’s backers. The Atlantica website
lists “minimum wage legislation,” “union density,” “government employment
as percentage of total state/province employment,” and “size of government”
as “public policy distress factors.” Such displays of unabashed dislike
for progressive social policy have served as a stark reminder to many people
of the dismal effects that the NAFTA agreement has had on New England and
Atlantic Canada. While the state of Maine lost close to 20,000 manufacturing
jobs between 1995 and 2003, Canadian workers have experienced stagnating
real wages, a decline in union protection, and an increase in the gap between
rich and poor since 1994. In Atlantic Canada and New England, small family
farms, once a staple of the local economy of the region, are facing a crisis
point.
When asked whether the political program of Atlantica included a lowering
of minimum wages, Cirtwell responded that such talk was a “red herring”
designed to be a “scare tactic” of Atlantica’s opponents. However, when
I spoke to Cirtwell’s predecessor, former AIMS Director Brian Lee Crowley
last May, his response was somewhat less definite. Crowley, who has since
been appointed a key economic advisor in Canada’s Department of Finance,
argued for the need to “ask the questions” about social policies such as
union density and minimum wage legislation, noting that “all of these things
involve trade-offs.”
The “trade-offs” for workers in North America as a result of globalization
in Atlantic Canada and New England reveal a cruel irony. The advent of
globalization in these two regions has seen the migration of manufacturing
and textile jobs to third world “export processing zones” where workers
are paid a tiny fraction of the wages in North America. Under Altantica,
goods produced in these sweatshops, particularly in China and Vietnam,
are now to be shipped back across the Atlantic, only to bypass the entire
New England-Atlantic Canadian region via large highway “corridors” en route
to the U.S. “heartland.”
For Sean Donahue of the Bangor-based Peace through Inter- American Community
Action, a grassroots community economic justice organization, this logic
reflects a continuation of the destructive process of corporate globalization.
For Donahue, this vision “undermines the idea of building from local regional
economies and makes us just another piece of infrastructure in a global
machine for moving goods from countries where production can be done cheaply
to consumers in the wealthiest parts of the world.”
Recognition of such trade-offs perhaps explains why opposition to the Atlantica
proposal has served as a focal point for coalition building and coordination
between environmental organizations, labor unions, NGOs, and community
organizations on Canada’s east coast. Such coalition building has not been
seen in this region since the run-up to the anti-Free Trade Area of the
Americas (FTAA) mobilizations in Quebec City in 2001. National organizations
such as the Canadian Labour Congress, Canada’s biggest trade union federation,
and the Council of Canadians, a 100,000- member citizen’s advocacy coalition,
have both weighed in against Atlantica and are also involved in the planning
for a large mobilization against an upcoming confer- ence on Atlantica
in Halifax in mid-June of this year.
Although Atlantica has yet to galvanize the same degree of public opposition
in the New England states, such organizing efforts are a clear indication
that the Atlantica “gateway” is far from a done deal.
Z
Stuart Neatby is a community activist and independent journalist based
in Halifax. (For more on Atlantica mobilizations see www.stopatlantica.org.)