Hoora - oops

Wednesday's Toronto Globe & Mail reported that Canada wants to push for "major changes" to NAFTA.

Certainly, that should be good news. The agreement, now in it's 11th year, has proved to be pretty much a loser for all concerned, as shown by a series of reports issued in January by Public Citizen, which said

NAFTA contained 900 pages of one-size-fits-all rules to which each nation was required to conform all of its domestic laws - regardless of whether voters and their democratically-elected representatives had previously rejected the very same policies in Congress, state legislatures or city councils. NAFTA required limits on the safety and inspection of meat sold in our grocery stores; new patent rules that raised medicine prices; constraints on your local government’s ability to zone against sprawl or toxic industries; and elimination of preferences for spending your tax dollars on U.S.-made products or locally-grown food. In fact, calling NAFTA a “trade” agreement is misleading, NAFTA is really an investment agreement. Its core provisions grant foreign investors a remarkable set of new rights and privileges that promote relocation abroad of factories and jobs and the privatization and deregulation of essential services, such as water, energy and health care.

(I should make clear that when I say "all concerned" I meant farmers, workers, the environment, and the national economies of Canada, the US, and Mexico. Which is really incorrect, since those are exactly the considerations that are not at the heart of NAFTA. Some corporations, on the other hand, have done quite nicely by NAFTA.)

Anyway, Canada wants changes. Good.

Canada will push for major changes to NAFTA that will cut short seemingly perpetual trade disputes over softwood lumber and other flashpoints, Prime Minister Paul Martin said yesterday.

In his first trip abroad since the June 28 election, Mr. Martin said he wants the North American free-trade agreement recast so that trade tribunals can quickly — and definitively — resolve such disputes. "Open markets should mean open markets. There has to be a court of final appeal," he said...

Oh. Not good.

The changes Martin actually wants in NAFTA would give it even more authority, give it more control, more power to pursue the same nowhere path we've followed for over 10 years even more forcefully.

And just in case there's any doubt as to the intent,

Trade consultant Peter Clark said that Canada tried - and failed - in negotiations to get provisions that allow panel decisions to supplant U.S. trade law.

"We didn't get it in '88. We certainly didn't get it in NAFTA," said Mr. Clark, president of Grey Clark Shih and Associates, an international trade consultancy.

That is, the purpose of the changes would be to empower a NAFTA panel - composed of trade consultants meeting in secret with no outside input allowed - to "supplant US law."

But of course, the ability of corporations and their government minions to override such impediments as unions, environmental regulations, public health and safety requirements, consumer protection laws, and all the rest of the things our economic masters find so icky was exactly the point of NAFTA all along. Just like it's the point of the WTO, of FTAA and CAFTA. The whole process of "globalization" is profoundly anti-democratic and ultimately destructive of justice. So just remember: When they say anything about "benefits" they mean for themselves. When they say anything about benefits for you, they're lying.

By the way: unfamiliar with FTAA and CAFTA? Don't be surprised. They like it that way.

Footnote: As I may have mentioned before but even if I did, so what, Global Exchange is a good source not only on globalization and associated trade issues but on alternative trade and human economic rights as well.