Preparing to protest
zach dubinsky & sok yin hooi, McGill Daily

Picture it: five years from now you're paying $48,000 to attend university. Medicare is outlawed. Increasingly scarce fresh water is now privatized and sold for profit. A hypothetical scenario, but this is what critics warn of unbridled free trade, and they say if current trends continue only an elite few will enjoy steady jobs with decent salaries, while the rest scrounge for piecemeal employment.

It's certainly a bleak and cynical vision of the future. But it has inspired tens of thousands of people from across the continent - professors, students, labourers, seniors, youths - to converge during the past year in Seattle, Washington and Windsor, speaking out against the globalization they say increasingly exploits ordinary people and the planet they live on. Next April they'll be in Quebec City for the Third Summit of the Americas, the latest proposal for trade liberalization. Students from a number of universities will play a large role in opposing the talks: a 34-country, hemisphere-wide deal called the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

Regional Integration at its Finest
The plan is to bind all nations in South, Central and North America and the Caribbean - all save Cuba, that is - into one free trade and investment zone. Based closely on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the FTAA would regulate $17 trillion in goods, services, and investment within the hemisphere. Or, rather, it wouldn't - the agreement's stated goal is to remove remaining limits on the free flow of capital by 2005, a move that would impact 800 million people.

The official FTAA Web site promotes the deal as the "largest regional integration effort ever undertaken." The breadth of the negotiations, it says, "is unprecedented even by the standards of the Uruguay Round," a seven-year-long series of talks that created the World Trade Organization in 1995. The scope of FTAA negotiations will go much further than current regional agreements in South and Central America, and eclipse even the WTO by including common rules on investment, government spending, and competition policy.

Proponents of the FTAA - mainly those in government and big business - say the deal would promote "economic growth, create jobs, make companies more competitive, and lower prices for consumers." According to Canadian government documents, the agreement would "provide poor countries with the chance to develop economically, and create the conditions in which democracy and respect for human rights may flourish." For proof, they cite NAFTA, Canada's current agreement with the United States and Mexico, saying all three countries have prospered immensely since the deal came into effect in 1994.

The NAFTA Experience
Critics aren't persuaded. Their myriad concerns with the proposed FTAA also, coincidentally, start with NAFTA. The North American agreement took the unprecedented step of including a section - the now infamous Chapter 11 - giving foreign companies the right to sue national governments for any actions "tantamount to a barrier to trade." Neither citizens nor domestic corporations have this power - the ability to sue their own government for passing laws that cut into their profits. And when foreign businesses do sue, it's not through regular channels such as the target country's court system. Decisions are made at closed-door tribunals consisting of one representative from each party to the dispute and an impartial third party.

While it seems nice on paper (Chapter 11 prevents the US from, for example, barring imports of Canadian beer on the spurious grounds of its taste), in practice the clause has paralyzed governments attempting to pass or uphold environmental and health legislation.

In 1997, when the Canadian government banned a potentially toxic fuel additive known as MMT, Ethyl Corporation, a US-based producer of the chemical, sued Canada for $251 million because the evidence of MMT's harmfulness was inconclusive. The government ended up paying $19 million to Ethyl and reversed its ban last year.

Mexico was recently ordered by a NAFTA tribunal to pay $25.5 million to US-based Metalclad, a waste company barred from operating a toxic waste plant in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi. Metalclad alleged local government officials were acting out of order after failing to get a building permit.

Even the mighty American government has suffered a loss of power over its own legislation. Vancouver-based Methanex Corporation is suing the US for $1.5 billion over a March 1999 California law ordering the phasing out of another gasoline additive, MTBE. Methanex, like Ethyl before it, says government concerns about the safety of the chemical are "unfounded." MTBE has been found in 10,000 groundwater wells in California, prompting the US government's adverse reaction to the suit. "No NAFTA [member-country] could carry out its most fundamental government functions unless it was prepared to pay for each and every economic impact," the government stated in its defence filing.

Some legal experts also argue that NAFTA offers dubious protections for public universities and medicare, as it defines these non-commercial government services in vague terms, as well as setting timelines for eventually phasing out such services altogether.

All this means that the FTAA's investment rules would be one of its most significant and controversial components.

Unlike free trade, attempts at large-scale investment liberalization through multilateral treaties are fairly recent, with NAFTA and the defunct Multilateral Agreement on Investment as major examples.

"'Liberalization' and 'free' trade has meant liberal treatment and freedom only for investors and transnational corporations," says a document published by the Council of Canadians, a national citizens advocacy group. "For the rest of us, it has meant more social, economic, and political exclusion. Investors have already used NAFTA's Chapter 11 several times in order to force North American governments to strike down laws or withdraw regulations originally designed to protect the environment or human health."

The Council further argues that, despite promises that this 'liberalization' benefits all, the gap between rich and poor is not narrowing. In Latin America, it points out, 36 per cent of the region's 204 million people live in poverty, the same proportion as in 1980. Poverty also has a stubborn presence in the Caribbean, the United States, and even Canada.

"We have already lived through nearly a quarter century of liberalization of our economies, privatization, deregulation, and the elimination of tariffs only to find that we are no better off than we were before," says Maude Barlow, the group's voluntary chairperson.

The Council of Canadians and many other public interest groups are not opposed to globalization per se. Both the Council and the Canadian Labour Congress, the umbrella group for the country's unions, believe stronger links between nations can foster respect for basic human rights and freedoms. But they don't see unfettered free trade as the way to go about it. They say free trade by itself only gives corporations rights, undermines the autonomy of nations, and places business and trade above all other concerns - environmental, social, and human. They put forth a vision for 'fair trade,' something they say the proposed FTAA won't accomplish.

Student Mobilization
"The FTAA will give corporations special rights that no country or citizen can claim," says Silvia Liertz, a third-year English literature student at McGill University. "Nations won't be able to protect their people or environment any more if their laws are deemed 'barriers to trade.'"

Liertz belongs to a group of students called FTAA-Alert McGill. They hope to help create "a coalition of students and community members who have concerns about quality education, labour, health care, the environment, women's rights, and colour issues," she says. "Since the FTAA attacks all these areas of public interest, it's an unusual opportunity for us to respond as a united front."

Besides the McGill group, anticipation of the upcoming summit has spurred individuals and organizations from across Quebec, Canada and North America into action. Groups based in Quebec City and Montreal are leading the preparations for alternative summits, teach-ins, workshops, and creative forms of public protest.

Canada's Biggest Security Risk in History
These community groups, however, are not the only ones preparing seriously for the event. The Quebec City summit will be the largest security operation in Canada's history - 34 heads of state, swarms of protesters, thousands of RCMP officers teaming with provincial and local police, and a $30 million tab.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service recently released a report titled "Anti-Globalization: a Spreading Phenomenon," as part of its mandate to investigate "any issue with the potential to cause threats to public or national security." The CSIS report details the "multi-generational, multi-class, and multi-issue" nature of these anti-globalization convergences, with "a broad spectrum of interests and agendas, of groups, lobbyists and networks, who use sophisticated methods and technology."

If experience is a good predictor, police will barricade huge sectors of city blocks, don gas masks, body armour, and riot shields, and as seen in the past, possibly wield pepper spray and rifles that launch tear-gas canisters.

The same scene played out dramatically over the past year at demonstrations in Windsor, Washington and Seattle - where in some instances police arguably outnumbered protesters. Quebec City has already announced that all merchants, residents, and official visitors will be required to show passes to enter the city core, and protesters will likely face a modern-day fortress in the only walled city in North America.

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