4 - Wednesday. February 6. 1991 - North Shore News is [raq involvement only way to get into Mexican trade talks? LET ME offer a prediction about one of the outcomes of the war against Iraq. It will seem tangential, but it isn’t. I predict that Canada will have a seat at the table during talks be- tween the U.S, and Mexico about expanding the free trade deal to include America’s southern neighbor as well as the one to the north. This is based on a report from a friend who was in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 15, the day before war broke out in the Gulf. She was there as part of a Canadian delegation monitoring the general discussions leading up to the commencement of talks between the Americans and Mexicans about free trade. The story dominating the meeting wasn't about the impen- ding war so much as it was about the war’s impact on Canada’s standing vis a vis the trade talks. While Canada — or, more ac- curately, the Mulroney ad- ministration — had deliberately wanted the talks to be trilateral rather than bilateral, there had been, until then, no assurances from the Yanks that Canuck con- cerns would be any kind of factor. The word my friend got was that Canada was going to be rewarded with a seat at the talks because it had taken the rigat position on the Gulf, i.e. it had done exactly as Uncle Sam demanded. For the Americans, the free trade deal with Canada is a pretty minor affair, a precedent and a warm-up exercise more than any- thing else. The main objective all along has been to cut a deal! with the 67 mil- lion Mexicans, not just because there are so many more of them than there are Canadians, but kecause of the demographics of the Mexican situation. While Canadians are getting older and the birth rate is falling, Meaico’s population is typically Thiid World. That is, mostly young. By working out a pact with the Mexicans, the Yankee traders — whose own population is greying too — are tapping into a second baby boom, with all the implica- Bob Hunter STRICTLY PERSONAL tions of selling everything from video games to running shoes. All along, I have assumed there had to be a quid pro quo in the secret deal that Brian Mulroney worked out with George Bush in order to justify Canada’s in- volvement in the morafly-am- biguous effort to launch an attack against one particular Arab dic- tator who happened to have momentarily displeased the White House and the Pentagon. Obviously -— at least, it should be obvious to anyone who isn’t a blood-crazed flag-waving jock — Canada’s presence in the Gulf war is the result of some sort of crazy-quilt policy involving com- promises, contradictions and back-flips enough to baffle even the most astute student of paradox. We are there to fight Iraq, thereby guaranteeing that we will enrage nearly every Muslim and Arab on the planet. Yet our ships are so old and embarrassingly vulnerable that they play only a backstop role, our warplanes are under orders to avoid serious aggressive action because they aren’t properly equipped for air-to-ground at- tacks, and our ground forces are absent (partially because the Mohawks might take over the country if we moved our troops to the Gulf), thereby guaranteeing that we will earn nothing but the contempt of those Western sailors, airmen and soldiers whe are in the front lines doing the dying. FRESH B.C. CHICKEN LEGS BACK ATTACHED Thru February 9/91 It sounds exactly like a policy, if there ever was one, devised by the likes of the spectacularly inept Joe Clark, with the even-more- inept Mulroney second-guessing him at every turn, and the possibly-even-more-inept-than- both-these-turkeys Defence Minister Bill McKnight sticking his klutzy finger in the pie every now and then — a Three Stooges epic writ large and expensive (to the minimum tune of $90- million-a-month). As it Wurns out, if my informa- tion is correct (and only time will tell), these buffoons may, in fact, have a game plan in the form of a secret agenda. According to this, Canada’s armed forces could very well have been fed into the meatgrinder in order to buy our reeling govern- ment a say in the big-stakes free trade poker game going on be- tween the Americans and the Mexicans. In other words, we are involved in fighting a war in the Mideast, not for any of the lofty ‘‘tyran- ny-busting’’ reasons offered by the Prime Minister and his mi- nions, but because a Tory gov- ernment that threw Canadian sovereignty to the winds by getting into bed economically with the American elephant is desperately trying to avoid becoming a jilted lover as the Americans roll over to the other side of the continental mattress to muck with the Mex- icans — who are already openly bragging that under expanded free trade they could take the lion’s share of the lucrative auto in- dustry spin-offs that Canada now enjoys. Hey, I'm jaded like the rest of you! F’ve also studied Canadian history enough to krow that the noble face that we present to the present political moment is largely a monstrous, brain-washed lie. This is a country that has suc- ceeded in being as bloody-minded and hypocritical as nearly any on Earth. 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