SPP and Election '08 : From Star Wars to listeriosis

Margaret Atwood gets it. (h/t West End Bob)

So does Kevin Brooker, columnist at the Calgary Herald :
Beware Government deals made secretly

"With all of the structural problems in the U.S. economy, is now the time to give deep integrationalists encouragement to do what we never asked them to do in the first place?"

Mr. Brooker is refering to the Con's summer release of their Competition Review Panel report "Compete to Win" , which recommends loosening up foreign investment restrictions and ending the prohibition on bank mergers.

Well just lol. The U.S. economy is tanking and we already have one of the world's most foreign dominated economies, but as usual, not U.S.-dominated/decimated enough for the North American Competitiveness Council, aka the Canadian Council of Chief Executives.

Let's do a little review of "Compete to Win", in their own words, courtesy of Integrate This! :

"The chief mechanism to deal with Canada–US border issues, the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), has yielded too little progress in improving crossborder flows. In this context, the Panel believes that it is imperative to intensify our bilateral effort with the US, focusing on facilitating the flow of goods, services and people across the Canada–US border"

URANIUM MINING
"The Minister of Natural Resources should issue a policy directive to liberalize the non-resident ownership policy on uranium mining..."

COMPETITION
"The Minister of Industry should introduce amendments to the Competition Act (to) align the merger notification process under the Competition Act more closely with the merger review process in the United States..."

TAXATION
"The federal, provincial and territorial governments should continue to reduce corporate tax rates to create a competitive advantage for Canada, particularly relative to the United States."

CANADA-U.S. ECONOMIC TIES
"Addressing the thickening of the Canada–US border should be the number one trade priority for Canada, and requires heightened direct bilateral engagement at the highest political levels."

REGULATION
"Canada should harmonize its product and professional standards with those of the US, except in cases where, and then only to the extent that, it can be demonstrated that the impairment of the regulatory objective outweighs the competitiveness benefit that would arise from harmonizing."

As Mr. Brooker notes :

"When these people sit down to discuss, say, environmental regulation, do you think it is to make those laws tougher?
Do you suppose they're spending much time thinking about how to preserve workers' rights?

And how about Canada's vast freshwater resources, which were specifically excluded from NAFTA. What are the chances that emergent "security" needs will put water back on the table and thus guarantee the U.S. permanent access, just like they got with our oil?"

The always incisive Laura Carlsen, director of Americas Policy program at the Center for International Policy, answers Mr. Brooker's questions with a quote from someone who should know :

"In April 2007, on the eve of the North American Trilateral Summit, Thomas Shannon, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, described the SPP's purpose with remarkable candor: The SPP, he declared, "understands North America as a shared economic space," one that "we need to protect," not only on the border but "more broadly throughout North America" through improved "security cooperation." He added: "To a certain extent, we're armoring NAFTA."

Carlsen notes: "This was the first time that a U.S. official had stated outright that regional security was no longer focused on keeping the citizens of the United States, Canada, and Mexico safe from harm, but was now about protecting a regional economic model."

Of course the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, Canadian wing of the NACC, not only have always known this, they are very keen to take credit for the idea. From their website :

"As our Council made clear in launching our North American Security and Prosperity Initiative in 2003, it is in Canada’s fundamental interest to pursue bilateral and trilateral agreements that will keep our border with the United States as open as possible, and this requires hard work on issues related to security....In this context, we would restate our view that it is in Canada’s interest to participate in the ballistic missile defence program."

Oh goodie! Pudding!


While I was over at the CCCE website perusing their "Blueprint", I ran in to this :

"In 2003, our Council proposed that the federal government adopt a “five percent solution”, which would require that each year, each minister and each deputy minister identify the least effective five percent of spending under their direction. This identification of relatively ineffective spending would provide a pool of resources that could be reallocated to new purposes if and when needed."

A 5% cut in each department's operating budget?
That sounds oddly familiar. And voilà!

"A Canadian Food Inspection Agency employee was fired on Friday for sharing with his union information he found in a Treasury Board document that CFIA planned to make a 5% cut in its operating budget by outsourcing responsibility for food inspections and the labelling of products to industry.

It's like watching a prophecy unfold, isn't it?
The CCCE proposes something; the Cons turn it into listeriosis.

On Oct 14, be sure you are not voting for these puddin' heads.

Cross-posted at Creekside

Ritzeriosis

Christie Blatchford wishes everyone would just shut the hell up about AgMin Gerry Ritz's appalling remarks about the listeriosis deaths:
"He wasn't speaking publicly. He was at work ... He was having what he assumed was a private discussion."
"It was perfectly normal human behaviour", she explains, just like the newsroom she once worked in that "had a pool guessing the date Terry [Fox] would die."
Well, she's Blatchford, isn't she?

RossK at The Gazetteer has his own concerns about all this concentration on Ritz's "death jokes".
In "Are The Media Dropping The Ball To Follow The Shiny Ritz?" , he notes that media attention on the jokes and who leaked them obscures the more important original question of

"who was involved in crafting changes to CFIA policy that led to the removal of government inspectors from meat processing plants after Nov 2007?"
"It is the identity of the person or persons who made that public health policy decision regarding self-regulation, not the identity of the person or persons who squealed on a Minister"

that is important here, says Ross.

Well, exactly.
Ross put the question to hard-working Hill reporter David Akin, whose response raises a whole load of other important issues about the difficulty reporters face in posing any questions to Harper at all.
Or to anyone else the PMO doesn't want them to talk to.

Akin writes : "Harper himself seems relatively unfazed by the disclosure of Ritz's comments."
I'll bet he is. Disclosure of Ritz's comments have been a positive boon.
Now we're no longer demanding to know who is responsible for the Decision of the Treasury Board Meeting, November 13, 2007 to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency:
"Inspection of Meat and Meat Products - shift from full-time CFIA meat inspection presence to an oversight role, allowing industry to implement food safety control programs and to manage key risks."

My take on the unfortunate media focus on the "jokes" goes like this : People like Blatchford will remember some off-colour remark they once made at work and how they didn't get fired for it so why should Ritz?
End of listeriosis issue. End of accountability for 18 deaths. Next.
Till the next case of Ritzeriosis privatization disaster.

Crossposted at Creekside