Fences and Windows (9 page)

What Mulroney doesn’t understand is that only economists worship wealth creation as an abstraction, only the very rich fetishize it as an end in itself. The rest of us are interested in those rising numbers on the trade ledger for what they can buy: does increased trade and investment mean we can afford to rebuild our health care system? Can we keep our promises to end child poverty? Can we fund better schools? Build affordable housing? Can we afford to invest in cleaner energy sources? Do we work less, have more leisure time? In short, do we have a better, more just, sustainable society?

The opposite is the case.

As Mulroney was kind enough to admit, “Free trade is part of a whole that includes the GST [Canada’s Goods and Services Tax], deregulation, privatization, and a concerted effort to reduce deficits, inflation, and interest rates.” These are the domestic preconditions of playing the global trade game—a package that, taken together, guarantees that the numbers Mulroney touts so proudly do little to address stagnant wages, economic disparities and a deepening environmental crisis.

And when economic growth is severed from meaningful
measures of social progress, thinking people begin to lose faith in the system. They start to ask difficult questions not only about trade but also about how economists measure progress and value. Why can’t we measure ecological deficits, as well as economic growth? What is the real social cost—in cuts to education, in increased homelessness—of the whole package of policies referred to by Mulroney?

These are the types of questions that will be heard in Quebec City this week. They will come from people such as José Bové, the French dairy farmer whose campaign is not against McDonald’s but against an agricultural model that sees food purely as an industrial commodity rather than the centrepiece of national culture and family life. They will come from health care workers questioning a trade system that defends patents for AIDS drugs more vigorously than millions of human lives. They will come from university students, paying more for their “public” education every year, while their schools have been invaded by ads and their research departments are being privatized one commercially sponsored study at a time.

The slogan People before Profits is dismissed as unfocused by free trade defenders, but it neatly encapsulates the sentiment running through the campaigns that are converging in Quebec City. The argument for barrelling ahead with the Free Trade Area of the Americas is based on an unshakable ideological belief that what’s good for business will be good for everyone—eventually. Even if that dubious argument is true, the timeline is unacceptable. According to the governor of the Bank of Mexico, at the current rate of
economic growth, it will be sixty years before Mexico doubles its per capita income and ends its extreme poverty.

What the protesters are saying is that human dignity and environmental sustainability are too important to be patiently prayed for like rain during a drought. They should not be belated side effects but the very foundations of our economic policies.

Thankfully, the protesters are resisting the pressure to come up with a one-size-fits-all alternative to free trade and are, instead, defending the right to genuine global diversity and self-determination. Rather than one solution, there are thousands, slowly coalescing into an alternative economic model. In Cochabamba, Bolivia, that means insisting that water is not a commodity but a human right, even if it means throwing out the international water conglomerate Bechtel. In British Columbia, it means First Nations and non-native rural communities demanding the right to manage “community forests,” which combine selective logging, tourism and local industry, as opposed to granting industrial tree-farm licences to logging multinationals. In Mexico and Guatemala, it means coffee farm co-operatives that guarantee a living wage and ecological diversity.

Some defenders of free trade say that if the protesters in Quebec City were serious, they would be on the other side of the chain-link fence that has been built to protect the delegates and that now physically divides the city. They say that protesters should be politely negotiating side agreements on labour, democracy and environmental standards.

But thirteen years after the first free trade agreement
with the United States, it’s not the details of the FTAA agreement (we still don’t know them) but the economic model itself that is under fire—the numbers just don’t add up.

Displaying his usual diplomacy, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien last week told the newspaper
Le Devoir
that thousands are coming to Quebec City to “protest and blah blah blah.” Quite the opposite. They’re coming to Quebec to protest because they’ve had it with the “blah blah blah.”

The following article was written eight months after the Quebec summit. It is included here because after the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., the trade-offs for increased trade became even more stark
.

In the name of fighting terrorism, the United States is demanding that Canada dramatically toughen security at its borders, as well as give up a great deal of control over them to U.S. security officers. Canada could scarcely be in a worse bargaining position: thanks to free trade, 87 percent of our exports go to the U.S. and almost half of our economy is now directly dependent on an open border.

Many Canadians see some border integration as the unavoidable price of protecting the $700 billion annual trade relationship with the United States. But Canadians are being asked to give up more than border control. We are also being asked to hand over a chunk of the economic dividends of years of economic austerity. Finance Minister Paul Martin’s “security budget,” delivered on December 10,
throws $1.2 billion directly at the border. Some of it is designed to protect Canadians from terrorists, but much of it must be seen for what it is: a new public subsidy for multinational corporations.

When Canadians accepted cutbacks to health care, unemployment insurance and other social programs, we were told that this austerity was necessary to attract foreign investors. We weren’t trading our social programs for free trade, the boosters said—on the contrary, only free trade would generate the kind of prosperity needed to rebuild our social programs.

But there’s a hitch. Just as Canadians were starting to imagine spending some of our recent national prosperity on new programs, it turns out that the budget surplus will not be used to make people more secure. It will be used to make trade more secure, to “keep our borders open,” as Martin said.

The proceeds of cross-border trade are going back into the border itself: to make it a terrorist-fighting and free-trade-flowing superborder. We are going to have “the most modern border in the world,” Martin enthused. This, it turns out, is the legacy of all the years of belt tightening: not a better society but a really great border.

The plan is to create multi-tier border crossings that are at once open for business but closed to “unwanted” people. This is no easy task, since migration of people and trade in goods tend to be interrelated.

That’s why Martin’s plan to open and close the border at once is so costly: $395 million to screen refugees and immigrants, $58 million to make border crossing smoother for
frequent business travellers, $500 million to crack down on illegal immigrants, $600 million over six years to improve the traffic flow.

Let’s pause for the irony. Free trade was supposed to lower the costs of moving goods across borders, thereby encouraging new investment. Now we have become so dependent on trade (and the U.S. has become so mistrustful of our ability to police ourselves) that we are spending hundreds of millions of new dollars just to keep the trade flowing.

Put another way, costs that used to be absorbed by the private sector in the form of export and import duties and tariffs have been transferred to taxpayers in the form of security costs. The border, the promise of so much prosperity, is turning into an economic sinkhole.

Annette Verschuren, president of Home Depot Canada, applauded Monday’s budget, saying, “We depend on the border to ensure that our goods get to our stores, and anything that speeds it up reduces our costs.”

Are the new security costs an unavoidable price to pay for our economic stability? Perhaps. But they should at least send a cautionary message to our politicians who are pushing to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement into the entire hemisphere.

Free trade has already taken a severe toll on our social programs and our ability to make sovereign immigration and refugee policy. It is now costing us billions in security dollars. Can we at least stop calling it “free”?

November 2000

When the right-wing Canadian Alliance candidate Betty Granger used the phrase “Asian invasion” last week, it was a flashback to Second World War “yellow peril” rhetoric and she was forced to resign. But there was another pearl of wisdom the candidate shared in the same speech, one that went largely unnoticed. Referring to boats of Chinese immigrants seized off the British Columbia coast, she said, “There was a realization that what was coming off these boats was not the best clientele you would want for this country.”

Clientele. It doesn’t have the same xenophobic ring as “Asian invasion;” in fact, it sounds positively clinical. But it may be more dangerous, especially because it is an idea that is not relegated to the fringe of the Alliance party but lies at the very centre of the immigration debate.

In rich countries like Canada, we often talk about migrant labourers as “clients,” while our country, with its public health care and reasonably healthy job market, is the product these clients would like to purchase. Since there are millions of migrants shopping around, we can carefully assess, as Granger did, whether they are “the best” clients available.

“Betty Granger just expressed out there in the open a prevailing, but false, idea about immigrants, which is that immigrants are people who come to be served,” says Fely Villasïn, co-ordinator of the advocacy group Intercede for the Rights of Domestic Workers, Caregivers and Newcomers.

The truth is that mass migration is not a form of homeland shopping: it is the flip side of the free trade policies our government so actively pursues. People don’t mortgage their futures to get on rusty boats because they are in the market for something a little more upscale. They do it because changes at home have left them without a job, without land, without choices.

It could have been a war or a hurricane. But it could also have been less dramatic shifts: farmland converted to export factories or industrial plantations, or drowned out by megadams. Last week, Nelson Mandela presented a report assessing the global impact of megadams, projects traditionally seen by the World Bank as necessary preconditions to joining the global economy. The report, published by the World Commission on Dams, found that the projects were dramatically increasing migration flows—1.2 million people will be displaced by China’s Three Gorges Dam alone.

Residents forced off their land by dams and other development schemes move to cities, and they also board boats destined for other countries. When Canada lobbies for more investment opportunities for our energy companies, all Canadians become complicit in this mass displacement of people—displaced by neo-liberal globalization itself.

But migrant workers, who now number 70 million to 85
million globally, are more than the unseen side effect of “free trade.” Once displaced, they also enter the free market, not as clients but as commodities, selling the only thing they have left: their labour.

Our government, we are told, favours a level playing field in the international trade of commodities. We have championed the World Trade Organization, and we are leading the charge to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement into Central and South America. We fight for the principle of treating foreign companies as we do our own: no unfair domestic subsidies, no extra regulations, no strings attached to investment.

But when the commodity being traded across borders is labour, these protections and principles disappear. Every year, roughly 200,000 migrant workers come to Canada to work as low-wage cleaners, seamstresses, nannies and seasonal farm workers. And yet our government has flatly refused to ratify the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, an agreement that would protect them from discrimination.

Instead, we have the Live-In Caregiver Program, which legislates unequal treatment for housekeepers and nannies who come to Canada and live in their employers’ homes. Under the program, migrants must work full-time without landed immigrant status or basic labour protections for twenty-four months over a three-year period. Only if they meet the work quota can they can apply for residency. If they don’t, they are deported.

Because they live in their workplace, unpaid overtime is rampant and sexual abuse is common. But because their immigration status depends on keeping these jobs, most workers are not inclined to complain.

In an Orwellian twist, corporations have seamlessly adopted the language of human rights: Wal-Mart and Exxon, trading cargo across borders, demand “fair and equal treatment” and “non-discrimination clauses.” Meanwhile, humans are increasingly treated like cargo, with no rights at all.

Betty Granger said the migrants who come to Canada are “not the best clientele.” In fact, it is Canadians who are the clientele for cheap migrant labour: we purchase it for our homes, farms, restaurants and factories. Only when we recognize that we are already participating in this free trade in people—and not generously opening our borders to the world’s needy—will migrants receive the protection that is their human right.

October 2001