The Sixth Estate

Such appointments would signal the priority the two leaders attach to the achievement of this deal. To represent Canada, we can think of no one possessing a better appreciation and the experience of successfully working both systems, as well as the gravitas, guile and good humour to get it done, than Brian Mulroney.

That‘s Colin Robertson of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute and Allan Gotlieb, former ambassador turned pro-business think tank sector advocate, proposing not only that the future of the Canadian-American border should be handed off to unelected and unaccountable technocrats answering only — and only in secret — to the Prime Minister and the President, but also that the best representative for Canada that they can think of is a lying tax evader who takes cash bribes from foreign arms dealers.

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Recently I was highly critical of Foreign Affairs trade negotiator Colin Robertson (currently “on loan” to right-wing academic institutions to build support for new deals) for suggesting in the Globe and Mail that, having negotiated a deal with the U.S., it was now time for the Canadian government to hold a “public debate” to build support for the decision that had already been made. I was also critical of the government’s decision to brief business groups on the new agreement at a time when it was still telling the public that Harper and Obama were in negotiations. Now Impolitical has pointed to a Toronto Star article discussing the government’s leaked communications strategy, which provides further evidence of the ways in which the government attempted to manipulate the public’s understanding of the deal.

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So far the media has yet to pick up on it, but the Security and Prosperity Partnership is coming back for another round at the political trough, and it’s time for the disturbingly unaccountable (on this score) leadership of Canada, the United States, and Mexico to have another go at “deep continental integration.” The recent meeting between the Canadian and American defence ministers (Mexico’s either couldn’t or wouldn’t attend, having come down with a convenient illness) was, it seems, merely a precursor.

I’m confident of the fact that there’s a broader push going on because of this morning’s Globe and Mail, where diplomat-turned-propagandist Colin Robertson expounds on the importance of integration. “Integration,” in this particular case, means the suppression of the power of democratically elected officials in any of the three countries in favour of a series of secretly negotiated, extra-Parliamentary (and extra-Congressional) technocratic agreements. I don’t mean this to sound as though it’s a conspiracy theory. Indeed, the American and Canadian governments are actually quite open about the fact that they’re negotiating important agreements behind the scenes.

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