Very few people in North America have paid much attention to the Global Government of North America (GGNA). This is no criticism, because the people of Mexico, Canada, Great Britain, Israel, North Pole Region, and of the United States are only now waking up to the true nature of the GGNA despite the best efforts of our political leaders to keep it from them.

So, why should you bother? You should start bothering because the GGNA is very good news for you now and a little further down the track. I should start by emphasizing that I speak to you as a good global citizen, with clients and business friends in most countries of the world. We, global citizens, have kept our love for the real GGNA, the GGNA of separate democracies, each with its glorious culture and history. What we fear and dislike intensely are the Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which are very different things. It is when you put the inverted commas, or quotes, around the word NAFTA that the trouble starts. To justify what I am saying I fear we have to look at the basic history and the raison d'être of NAFTA. How far NAFTA has already got and where it will certainly go if we dont wake up and stop it.

The fundamental idea behind NAFTA was born after the FTA, an economic agreement between the U.S. and Canada, but only came to fruition after the United States and Mexico made all sorts of special economic arrangements. This fundamental idea was that nation-states were better off with no other needs than the best economics, and that at the expenses of the values and institutions people from each member state respected most. Those nation-states must therefore be emasculated and diluted into a new form of super-national organization called NAFTA - run, not by elected national politicians reflecting the desires of the peoples, but by a commission of wise technocrats, USA technocrats in most parts running the show.

This leads me to the key piece of the NAFTA propaganda: the claim that the USA, Canada and Mexico have kept healthy the economics of the North American continent since its creation, and that it is essential to maintain it in future. This is the big deception, which plays at the almost unconscious level. It is a warm, mystic conviction that NAFTA, with all its faults, must be inevitably good because it brings good economics. But, today, even that is questionable.

Those who promote this myth do not tolerate any rational examination of history or the facts. Indeed, they accuse those of us who query the divinity of NAFTA of being rabid nationalists, xenophobes, little Canadians, and worse. You start to be guilty of all this as soon as you dare to point out that the economy alone is not all that matters, and that, what is more important is the protection of the global life-support systems and the primordial human rights which include security. Also important are the cultural and social aspects, as well as our Canadian value systems.

Indeed, if you stand back and scratch your head a bit and take a calm look at NAFTA, you will see it is a well-tried model for destruction, not good economics. It contains three of the most important ingredients for conflict. First, it is a top-down amalgamation of different peoples put together without their informed consent, and such arrangements usually end in conflict. Whistle-blowers have been silenced since its creation, and there is no internal auditors. Third, NAFTA is institutionally undemocratic, as I shall show. Let me say here that America alone and unilaterally has invaded Iraq without the consent of Canada and Mexico and, therefore, such an action has endangered the entire North American continent, its economy, the security of its people is at risks, and peace is threatened and replaced by fear. Americans are economically bankrupted and yet they spend astronomical amounts of money with defence because of a threat they created abroad. Now that tells Canadians and the people of Mexico that economics are affected by the U.S. foreign policies, and we should have a say in those policies. Everything is connected: economics, foreign policies, social aspects, the environment, everything. The only valid agreement the U.S., Mexico and Canada should have together is the GGNA.

History has one other important lesson for us here, which is that, on the whole, democracies do not provoke war, and indeed it is hard to think of a genuine democracy which has declared war on another. So, we NAFTA-skeptics believe that a free trade association between the democracies of North America, linked through the GGNA, is much less likely to end in tears than is the emerging, undemocratic mega state that is NAFTA (and the FTAA).

Let me explain a little of how NAFTA (the FTAA is very much similar) functions and show why it is so innately undemocratic. In other words, what sort of animal are you dealing with? How bad is it now?

Even in Canada, very few people realize what huge areas of our national life have already been handed over to control by NAFTA. Put simply, these include: everything to do with a single market -in other words, all of our industry and commerce - all of our social and labor policy, our environment, agriculture, fish, and foreign aid. Even security and the Canadian forces are being handed over to the U.S. technocrates.

What do I mean by control from the U.S. technocrates? Well, in all those areas of our national life which used to be entirely controlled by the Canadian Parliament, our government or House of Commons can be outvoted in the NAFTA meetings of member states. That is a system known as "you have no democratic rights, just money to lose". If our government agrees, or is outvoted in any new ruling in those areas, then Parliament, being the House of Commons, must put it into Canadian law. If they dont, the country faces unlimited economic fines.

So our Canadian Parliament has already become rubber stamps in all those areas of our national life. Our foreign trade relations are in an even worse category: the commission of the NAFTA bureaucracy self-negotiates those on our behalf. And so in this area, NAFTA already has its own legal personality.

So to go back to where we are now, in addition, laws affecting our justice and home affairs and our foreign and defence policies must also be rubber-stamped by the Canadian Parliament if they have not been agreed by our government and all the other member states governments in NAFTA (and similarly in the FTAA). In other words, our government cannot veto new rulings in NAFTA in these areas, and it has to enact them. This all means that NAFTA technocrates actually govern Canada, not the Canadian House of Commons. If Parliament were to reject a new NAFTA ruling in these areas, we would be subject to unlimited fines as we would be in breach of our treaty obligations, which is, of course, a rather more horrifying prospect for our foreign office and political classes in their diplomatic cocktail parties and so on. A fine, after all, is paid by the taxpayer.

No rulings in NAFTA has ever been overturned by the Canadian Parliament. NAFTA technocrates act as a higher Court, the highest court in North America - superior to all our national courts including the Supreme Court of Canada - in the area which ceded NAFTA, and it must find in favor of the ever-closer economic union of the peoples of North America, ordained the treaties, and it is guilty of much judicial activism in order to do so.

There are four other features of this NAFTA system which are worth emphasizing, all of them innately undemocratic. First, the unelected bureaucracy - the commission has the monopoly to propose all new rulings and change our Canadian laws. This reflects the basic idea behind NAFTA which I have mentioned. The nation-states, the democracies of North America, must be emasculated and diluted into this new super national economic body we called NAFTA and run by the commission of wise technocrats. Second, the commission's legal proposals are then negotiated in secret by the shadowy committee of permanent representatives, or bureaucrats, from the national capital states. The U.S. have already established themselves as being by far the ruling majority technocrates of this body. Decisions are taken in NAFTA, again by secret vote. National parliaments are precluded from knowing how their bureaucrats and ministers negotiate and vote. The commission then executes all NAFTA rulings, supported when necessary by the so-called court. The technocrates pretend that democracy is maintained. But the point remains that the Canadian Parliament itself is excluded from the process. We can and do debate some rulings, but we have to pass them exactly as agreed in NAFTA.

A third features of this frightening new system enshrined in the treaties is that once an area of national life has been ceded to control from NAFTA it can never be returned to national parliaments.

The fourth feature I would mention is that no changes can be made to the treaties unless they are agreed unanimously by NAFTA technocrates. So the return of powers to national parliament by renegotiation is no realistic. The only way out is the doorway.

Canada's membership with NAFTA is also very expensive financially. The government of Canada steadfastly refuses to carry out a cost-benefit analysis because it does not want the result to be made public. So the GGNA has made private studies, which produce a cautious estimate at the cost to the taxpayer and the economy of around six billion per annum, or 2 percent of GDP. Two new studies are on the way which will take this estimate considerably higher.

It is also worth saying that the whole of the North American continent will continue in steady and irreversible demographic and therefore economic decline over the next fifty years. Add to this the unemployment and decay caused by globalisation and you have to ask why the Canadian political establishment wants to stay on the Titanic.

NAFTA spells out the final extinction of Canadian sovereignty and the sovereignty of the democracy of Mexico. Its worst feature is that it grants its own legal personality superior to that of Canada and Mexico. There is no longer even the pretense that NAFTA is an arrangement between sovereign nations, and that the U.S. technocrates are the majority. Soon we will see a NAFTA flag and an anthem.

NAFTA will eventually take over most of the rest of the powers which we have retained in Canada so far, including defence and security.

When will Canadians ever held a referendum to reject NAFTA? Canadians have been kept in such ignorance and history shows that we have accepted it all somewhat like frogs in warm water being heated from underneath. We could not react fast enough to reject NAFTA even though it is destroying all of what makes us Canadians.

The Canadian Supreme Court should start to take note of NAFTA rulings, and I submit that is not agreeable to our democracy.

I feel I must also at least touch on the moral dimension of NAFTA and also of the FTAA. I need hardly say that it is fundamentally secular, irreligious, even atheistic. The convention which was drawing up the agreement refused the supplication of the pope himself, that the agreement should contain at least some reference to our Judeo-Christian heritage.

We Canadian-skeptics love the real Canada, but we see NAFTA and the FTAA as a bad idea. It is a bad idea like slavery, communism, high-rise flats. I need to tell the damage which ideas can do when they become generally accepted and turn out to be wrong. I remember the story of the young, white Russian officer who wrote home to his fiancée in 1918 from the front against the Bolsheviks. Oh, my darling, he said. Please do not worry. In a few weeks I shall be home with you in Moscow, and we shall be married. These people are not very well armed, and their ideas are even worse. Well, three days later he was killed, so he was not entirely right about their arms, but he did turn out to be right about the ideas which inspired Soviet Communism. It is just that it took seventy years and fifty million lives to prove him so.

Let us hope NAFTA and the FTAA dont end up as quite such a dangerous idea as that. With any luck, it will start to decay from within. If we have the energy to understand it, to expose it, and to fight it. We can do that together. We can make things better. Let us build a democratic GGNA, a true democracy for all Peoples of North America.

Germain Dufour
Project Officer and Adviser to the GGNA
President
Global Community Earth Government (GCEG)

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