Meryl Smith Lawton

Friendly Differences | Green Party leader Elizabeth May and former Liberal cabinet minister Anne McLellan at the InterVivios debate.

Anne McLellan and Elizabeth May have a long history together. They first met at an ice cream parlour in Halifax while the two women were studying law at Dalhousie more than 25 years ago.

That history, and a mutual sense of humour and love of debate, added much-needed levity to their arguments at a recent Edmonton discussion on the future of North America economic integration and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). (Well, McLellan did roll her eyes dramatically when May called the former Grit cabinet minister a closet Green, and McLellan did suggest the Green Party leader is something of a conspiracy theorist, but what’s a few quips between friends?)

The debate on Nov. 21 was organized by InterVivos, a local group focused on connecting students and young professionals with community leaders, with an eye to helping young people become leaders themselves in the future.

McLellan is currently a scholar in residence at the University of Alberta’s United States policy department, and was the MP for Edmonton-Centre in the Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin governments. She points out that although it was U.S. president-elect Barack Obama who started the recent discussions about renegotiating NAFTA, the notion hasn’t gained any real traction.

And that’s too bad, because the treaty needs a revamp, she says, and should be expanded. The transition period where the three countries were losing jobs to each other is long over, and trade between the U.S. and Canada reached over a trillion dollars last year. Other trading blocks like India and China pose the real threat to jobs, and in order to be competitive with them, NAFTA must be expanded.

“We will either become three independent countries foraging for ourselves,” she says, “or we take NAFTA, with its faults, and we have the creativity and courage to say that there is something special about these three countries, that we have enough in common that, yes, is about trade, but is also about shared values.”

May agrees that the trade agreement needs to be renegotiated, but far from wanting to expand it, May would scale back controversial sections like Chapter 11, which she says gives corporations too many rights.

“Canada has lost out,” she says, “sometimes in cases with millions of dollars at stake, for doing things that normally are within the jurisdiction of a Canadian government to do.”

The most recent example she cites is a suit by a Dow Chemical subsidiary against the government of Quebec over a ban on weed killer 2,4-D.

And in terms of the money involved in trading with the U.S., even if NAFTA were completely eliminated, May says, there are still treaties like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) already in place. Without offering many more benefits, NAFTA poses a significant threat to our democracy.

May would also renegotiate the separate agreement on energy between Canada and the United States, which she interprets as meaning that Canada must sell the same amount of energy to the U.S., even if it means there isn’t enough for our own needs.

If the two women differ on NAFTA, May and McLellan were worlds apart on the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) agreement, which is an attempt by the three governments of North America to harmonize regulations and increase security.

McLellan was at the 2005 SPP meetings in Waco, Texas, when the three governments agreed to ongoing talks, and was the minister in charge of seeing it carried out. She says there was never any intention to keep it secret, and there was media coverage of the meeting in Waco.

Labelling the agreement anything sinister is pure conspiracy theory, she says.

“I must be a conspiracy theorist,” May says, “because the Security and Prosperity Agreement scares the hell out of me.”

There is publicly available information on the agreement, but that’s a far cry from having civil society actually involved in creating the agreement, she says. Certainly when the trade talks were held in Montebello, Que., in Aug. 2007, there was an atmosphere of secrecy, and only business was at the table.

There is a dark side to the North American “community,” she says, pointing to another agreement signed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper allowing American troops to operate under American command on Canadian soil. 

“Security and troops on the ground is more than an economic union,” she says. “It becomes the end of your political independence as a nation.”

In the discussions that followed the debate, one group expressed its own need to actually read NAFTA. Indeed, many of the people there would have been too young to read the treaty when it was signed in 1994.

And in some cases, they would not have even been born when then-law students May and McLellan met at a Halifax ice cream parlour.

abrunschot@see,greatwest.ca