Much More Than Corn Flakes

One of the earlier chapters in the saga was the Canada US Free Trade Agreement (FTA) which has since mutated into the NAFTA. Where most Canadians believed this was going to allow them to go on duty free shopping sprees in the US the FTA had little to do with free trade in the true sense. It is more to do with controlled and captive trade. Canada, which prior to the FTA had a healthy and mutually beneficial trading relationship with the US, went from being a branch plant economy to a captive economy. John Foster Dulles, US Secretary of State (1953-1959) once said that it was unnecessary to conquer countries militarily. All that was necessary was to get control of their economies. The US has since used free trade agreements globally as a means to this end. Canada with the FTA was merely one of the earliest and most compliant client states. Another chapter comes in the form of Canada’s willingness to see US enforcement agencies from the FBI, to the DEA to the CIA and yes, the Texas Rangers operating freely within this country. This was greatly accelerated by the panicked overreaction to 9/11. Where supposedly they are working in co-operation their counterpart’s Canadian agencies have proven to be all too compliant and Canadian citizens are falling under the jurisdiction of US law rather than our own. This is very much exemplified in the cases of Mark Emery, Maher Arar and Omar Khadr. Most recently, the Harper government has passed legislation allowing these agencies to carry guns within the country. Could this ultimately lead to disbanding the troubled RCMP, sub-contracting our policing to the Texas Rangers and re-instating capital punishment? It is no coincidence Canada is in the Afghanistan war even though it is America’s war, which they left unfinished as they diverted their forces into the Iraq war. NATO countries have been pressed into service because the US has an acute shortage of ground troops. NATO has gone from being a Cold War defense alliance to an instrument of US foreign policy. Increasingly, Canada’s military is being integrated with that of the US. Their wars are becoming our wars. Canada’s increased defense spending is no doubt prompted by pressure from Washington. Official Ottawa fails to see that sovereignty is like a muscle that must be exercised from time to time. If it is not it simply withers. Where it is not exercised countries like the US come to expect compliance as a matter of routine and official Ottawa lapses into a pathetic servitude as the path of least resistance. The problem with Kirton’s “tyranny of small differences” is that differences large and small constitute a country’s sovereignty in relation to another. Canada over recent decades has suffered an erasure of many differences and ultimately the accumulative effect is a huge loss of sovereignty. Unfortunately this country called Canada has an over abundance of philistines, corporate and political, who put no value on things Canadian, defer to American values and priorities indiscriminately and cannot differentiate between co-operation and capitulation. Given our recent history Canadians have no reason to trust our political and economic elites to strike a just, mutually respectful and beneficial relationship with our powerful neighbour, especially when important matters are settled by stealth and secrecy. We must also consider that in the aftermath of 9/11 the stated need for increased North American security has become a phobic obsession harnessed to a political agenda of dubious integrity. Robert Billyard (c) [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on August 22, 2007]