The Conscience of Canada strikes again

BOOK REVIEW: Too Close for Comfort: Canada's Future Within Fortress North America

By JENEFER CURTIS
The Globe and Mail
Saturday, November 5, 2005

Back in the seventies, an energetic housewife named Maude Barlow jumped onto the feminism bandwagon. A few short years later, she was advising prime minister Pierre Trudeau on women's issues. When she failed in her bid for federal office, she helped found the Council of Canadians, now Canada's main citizen's advocacy group. Ever since, along with a few other citizen's groups, she and the council have been the conscience of Canadian politics. Free trade, the bank mergers, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, safe milk, public pensions -- no other group has bellowed a critical voice at as many issues as the Council of Canadians.

Sadly, thanks to some of its methods and the elite accommodation that plagues today's Parliament Hill and provincial legislatures, the council has had little actual influence. But it raises awareness. And Barlow churns out a lot of books. This one is her 14th. Every Canadian should read it, its oversights notwithstanding.

Barlow's thesis in Too Close for Comfort is that, driven by the interests of both American and Canadian big business, our government is committed to create a "North American fortress with a common economic, security resource and regulatory and foreign policy framework." This despite antipathy by Canadians toward U.S. President George Bush.

Bush is probably the chief villain in this typical Barlovian call-to-arms, followed closely by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives' Thomas D'Aquino. The latter, Barlow delights in reporting, went on a 10-city "tour" of the United States, apologizing for Canada's refusal to support the Ballistic Missile Defence Plan. John Manley, positioned here as an accomplice of D'Aquino and referred to by one source as "the politician in whom the Bush administration had the greatest trust," and Conservative Party Leader Stephen Harper also get severely scolded.

Barlow's catalyst for the "deep integration" of our two countries (Mexico is hardly mentioned, despite the title's reference to North America) is security measures. The U.S. government is "retooling its military" to the annual tune, in 2005, of $445-billion -- the Iraq occupation alone is costing $220-billion -- and we are following suit, copying its laws, increasingly sharing information with it and potentially allowing for unprecedented invasions of privacy and violations of human rights.

She rightly attacks Bill C-36, the Anti-Terrorism Act, put in place right after 9/11; its sweeping powers include the rights to carry out a preventive arrest without warning, compel a person believed to have information about a terrorist to testify before a judge (and thereby remove a person's right to remain silent), wiretap suspected terrorist groups for up to a year, and lay criminal charges against anyone who knowingly participates in activities of a terrorist group. The bill's broadened definition of terrorism is such that, as academics have commented, South Africa's Nelson Mandela would be considered a terrorist.

And she offers up dozens of smaller yet eerie examples: What about the fact that the private data of thousands of Canadians with outstanding student loans is now available on request by U.S. Homeland Security officials, thanks to the sale of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce student loan subsidiary Edulinx to a U.S. company called Nelnet?

Did you know that the new U.S. Ambassador to Canada, David Wilkins, was once campaign chairman for the late Strom Thurmond, the former senator most known for his opposition to equality for blacks? Barlow spends too much time passing on such accusations and lamenting the neo-conservative movement, the rise of the Christian right and U.S. military aggression before coming to the crux of the book: the "incremental and systemic harmonization of Canadian and American regulations and standards governing health, food safety and all aspects of the environment."

Anyone who works with a border-associated body in Ottawa can vouch for the accuracy of this phrase. They will tell you, as Barlow does, about "Smart Regulations," a laborious federal government initiative that is bringing countless regulations in line with international trade and investment policies. (That this initiative was started before 9/11 disrupts her thesis that this whole "fortress" has its roots in security matters.)

Many of Barlow's evil ramifications of Smart Regulations are factually correct: that it is crystallizing relationships with like U.S. bodies, that deregulation of certain industries is happening and that certain U.S. methods might infiltrate Canada. For instance, if C-27, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency Enforcement Act, becomes law, there is evidence that the U.S. preference for industrial livestock feed, which allegedly caused bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE), will prevail here, over our more costly family-farm methods.

The book contains some oversights, a glaring one being the fact that a document she quotes frequently -- the CCCE's final report from its Task Force on the Future of North America -- was rejected by current Minister for Public Safety Anne McLellan. Also, many of our anti-terrorism measures came in response to our international obligations, and are not evidence of kowtowing to the United States. As well, her sources all seem to be activists or fringe groups. If she had, for example, talked to a government bureaucrat, she might realize that the line between "harmonization" and "co-operation" is fine, and that Canada is holding onto "made-in-Canada" approaches in several policy areas.

Moreover, there are examples where working together with Americans might be advantageous to Canada. Consider again the BSE crisis. "If we had openly shared all the science with the States," one agricultural insider recently commented, " they might not have been able to justify closing the border on a food-safety basis as they did."

But Barlow is onto something important, especially in the area of security, where any government always risks disrupting that delicate balance of protecting both the community and individual freedoms and privacy. The Senate's report on the Anti-Terrorism Act -- essentially a review-to-date of the legislation -- is due out Dec. 18. Already, the government has claimed that the contentious clauses in the act have been used sparingly, a sheepish defence if ever there was one.

Meanwhile, as retired Globe and Mail political columnist Hugh Winsor wrote this week, Canada's Muslim and Arab communities, thanks to U.S.-inspired heavy-handedness on the part of our security services, are beginning to feel like second-class citizens.

She may make a few errors, but the wake-up call that Barlow sends out in this informative and timely book more than makes up for them.

Jenefer Curtis is an Ottawa political writer. Her book The Hired Guns: How Lobbyists are Shaping Canada will be published next spring.

Dates in BC from Maude Barlow's speaking tour:

November 7 Prince George, British Columbia
University of Northern British Columbia, CANFOR Room
This event is co-sponsored by Prince George PIRG 7:00 p.m.

November 8 Parksville, British Columbia
Parksville Community and Conference Center
132 Jensen Avenue East
Sponsored by Oceanside Coalition for Strong Communities, 7:00-9:00 pm

November 9 Victoria, British Columbia
The Da Vinci Centre, 195 Bay St. (Victoria West) 7:30 p.m.

November 10 Vancouver, British Columbia
Maritime Labour Centre,1880 Triumph St.
(Triumph and Victoria) 7:30 p.m.

Council of Canadians website for Too Close for Comfort