4 - Wednesday, July 10, 1991 - North Shore News

The FTA has
sold out the
environment

IT’S BEEN a year and a half since the Free Vrade Agree-
ment (FTA) was signed. Ronald Reagan called it ‘tan eco-
nomic constitution for North America.’’ Canadian na-
tionalists and lefties called it a sell-out.

During most of the debate
leading up to tne FTA, | was on
“‘green Tory’’ Pat Carney’s side,
believing that some such deal was
Canada’s only hope in a world
where gigantic trading blocs are
forming on every side.

A middle-ranking trading nation
shut out of every major bloc
would die a horrible economic
death.

The emergence of a de facto
Japanese economic sphere of con-
trol in southeastern Asia (one of
wartime Japan's major goals)
leaves Canada with little room to

NEWS photo Teny Peters

A DUMP TRUCK got dumped last Wednesday afternoon on Ostler Court in North Vancouver.
While attempting to deliver a load of topsoil the vehicle's centre gate failed to open, causing it

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to tip over - no one was injured.

the European Common Market —
the new Iron Curtzin, on the
wrong side of which we stand,
plaintively Nogging our traditional
wares: logs and fish and fur and
the promise of cheap electricity.

Ms. Carney, | would suggest,
was prescient.

lt was a disgusting choice, but it
came to either getting in bed with
the hairy old Yankee pig-dogs,
and doing what you must do, or
risk getting left out in the freezing
wind of globalization.

Now, of course, courtesy of
Mexico, Canada will now be get-
ting it at both ends. (Forgive the
crudeness of the imagery, but,
honestly, that’s about what it
amounts to. In fact, images of
bondage come to mind, with the
Tories lashing fair Canada,
despite her screams, to a
workbench, while Americans and
Mexicans drool in the
background.)

Obviously, my opinion about
the FTA changed somewhere
along the line. I now think that in
the end the deal was so poorly
negotiated it left Canada’s en-
vironment, as well as her
economy, spread-eagled before
U.S. companies.

When I changed my mind about
the FTA was just before Pat
Carney quit as chief of the
negotiating team (replaced by the
laughable John Crosbie). A coali-
tion of Canada’s leading en-
vironmental groups came out
against the trade deal at that time.
Like a lot of other people, f
became alarmed.

The macroeconomics of it might
still make all the theoretical sense
a layman could ask, but in the
real world, things were unrav-
elling, as I should have expected.

While the Tories were bragging
that environment hadn't been
tguched by the FTA (and
therefore somehow ‘‘safe’’), the
fact was that the agreement was
very explicit about agriculture,
forest management, energy,
pesticide regulation, food safety
— matters that, taken together,
constitute the very environment
itself.

I have never blamed Pat Carney
for thinking, as she did, back in
1987-88, that free trade was nec-
essary. The final botching of the
deal was the work of John
Crosbie, who, as a New-
foundlander, had only entered
Confederation in 1949, and never
really gave a damn about Canada.

Carney, by way of contrast, was
a closet greenie who, as head of
Petro Canada quietly shielded her
native West Coast from oil ex-
ploration, and, as federal energy
minister, refused to become a
huckster for the nuclear industry.

I’m sure she would not have Icft
environment to the tender mercies

er

STRICTLY PERSONAL

of the likes of the U.S. National
Coal Association, which saw the
final FTA as a means to elimi-
nate‘‘regulatory disincentives”’ to
more coal-fired plants, or the U.S.
Non-Ferrous Metal Producers
Committee, which has already us-
ed the FTA to challenge Canadian
pollution control regulations at
copper, zinc and lead smelters as
“unfair trade practices."’

l asked Steven Shrybman of the
Canadian Environmental Law
Association to evaluate the effects
of the FTA 18 months later. He
gave the deal an across-the-board
thumbs-down from an en-
vironmental point of view, citing:

* A $10-billion project to de-
velop natural gas in the Mackenzie
delta being pushed by Canadian
subsidiaries of Shell, Gulf and
Esso, purely to serve export mar-
kets in the U.S.;

James Bay II, the $50-billion
boondoogle in Northern Quebec
which threatens to become this
year’s Oka. One of the largest
engineering projects ever under-
taken, it would decimate an eco-
system the size of France, all to
provide 26,000 megawatts for
American customers and financial
independence for Quebec;

« Since the FTA, there has been
a ‘‘virtual explosion’’ of proposais
to build large scale logging and
pulp operations, such as the Jap-
anese mills planned for Northern
Alberta, mainly funded by transi-
tional corporations using their
American offices to jump into
Canada;

* By promoting specialization
of food production and trading on
a global scale, the free trade deal
encourages the transporation of
food over long distances, which
requires the use of three times as
much energy in processing,
packaging and shipping.

A year and a half later, warn-
ings of an ‘‘environmental sell-
out’’ under the FTA look like
much more than left-wing para-
noia. | wonder if Senator Carney
has had any second thoughts?

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