By guest blogger Alison@Creekside
After it became clear that the main result of the Security and Prosperity Partnership meet-up in Montebello was to alert Canadians to the fact that their country’s sovereignty was in deep shit, deep integration’s best friends were unanimous in their tough love advice to the ailing SPP’s enablers.
Tom d’Aquino of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, Harper’s eminence grease Tom Flanagan, the Hudson Institute, the Fraser Institute, John Ibbitson and Neil Reynolds of The Globe and Mail, the usual gang all proposed the same thing. Don’t hide your blight under a Bushel, they all said — explains it to da peeps.
The Natty Post has stepped up magnificently to this cheerleading task with three-count ’em-three editorials on how absolutely vital it is to Canada’s economic health to sell out to the plummeting rogue plutocracy to the south.
Michael Hart from Carleton U., a NAFTA negotiator, a former official at Foreign Affairs and Int. Trade, and a sometime “deep integration” teacher at the North American University, writes: Canada blew it.
“The crisis of Sept. 11, 2001, provided a perfect opportunity to seize the moment to re-imagine the border, but Canada blew it.”
According to Hart, we foolishly we squandered this unique opportunity to implement “the structural and institutional changes of deep integration” because of “nationalist phobias”.
Silly us.
Hart laid the deal out rather more clearly when he testified at the Int. Trade Committee on SPP in May last year –you know, the one that Con Chairman Benoit huffed out of in a hissy fit. “We have made a political choice that we wanted a more deeply integrated North American economy,” Hart said. “That means a willingness on our part to, for example, strengthen the perimeter around North America in order to deal with security issues that are uppermost in American minds.”
Uppermost in my mind at the moment, Mike, is the peculiar way you’ve turned being on the wrong end of Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism into “a perfect opportunity.”
Onward to the second Natty Post SPP-plumping editorial . . . from another Carleton U. guy who happens to be the editor of the Financial Post: U.S. border is killing free trade. Integration just isn’t happening fast enough for Terrence Corcoran: Harper’s Tories are “complacent” while Stockwell Day’s record is “dismal.”
Probably because they’re hoping to be re-elected, Terry.
And thirdly . . . Natty Post excerpts from a Woodrow Wilson paper, Economic Integration in North America :
“Canada’s monetary independence acts as a major barrier to economic integration.
Until Canada decides to adopt the U.S. dollar, formally or informally, and hitch its business cycle more closely to the American rhythm, further integration will confront natural limits.”
“Further integration will confront natural limits.”
That, of course, will be us.
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