Global Community is this great, wide, wonderful world made of all these diverse global communities.

Global Community is defined around a given territory, that territory being the planet as a whole, as well as a specific population, which is Global Community. Global Community has the power to make the laws of the land and to make the rules for the territory of the Earth. Global Law has been and continue to be researched and developed for this purpose.

Conservation, restoration, and management of the Earth resources is about asking ourselves the question of "Who owns the Earth?" The large gap between rich and poor is connected to ownership and control of the planet's land and of all other Earth natural resources.We, Global Community, must now direct the wealth of the world towards the building of local-to-global economic democracies in order to meet the needs for food, shelter, universal healthcare, education, and employment for all.

Global Community has proposed a democracy for the people based on the fact that land, the air, oil, minerals, other natural resources rightly belong to Global Community. The Earth is the birthright of all life.

The Global Economic Model proposed by Global Community is truly the best response to the world.

The definition of Global Community concept is truly the 21st century "philosophy of life" framework, some called it the religion of the third millennium, others called it the politics of the future generations now. This definition includes all people, all life on Earth. It also implicitly says that no-one in particular owns the Earth but we all own it together. Not just us people, but all life on Earth owns it. The beginning of life stretches as far back as 4 billion years, and so Life claims its birthright of ownership of Earth, and so does the Soul of all Life, the Soul of Humanity.

Following this thinking we see land ownership is no longer a problem. The Earth and all its natural resources belong to all the "global communities" contained therein. A village, or a city is "a global community" and owns the land around its boundaries. Along with Global Community, it has ownership of all natural resources within its boundaries.

As mentioned above, land here, by definition, covers all naturally occurring resources like surface land, the air, minerals deposits (gold, oil and gas etc), water, electromagnetic spectrum, the trees, fish in the seas and rivers. It is unjust to treat land as private property or a commodity. Land is not a product of labor. Everyone should therefore be given equal access to all natural resources.

On the global level the Law of the Seas Covenant is an example of a global community lease payment basis for public needs as it has affirmed that ocean resources are the common heritage of all and a proper source of funding for global institutions. Water belongs to the Earth and all species and is sacred to life therefore, the world’s water must be conserved, reclaimed and protected for all future generations and its natural patterns respected.

Water is a fundamental human right and a public trust to be guarded by all levels of government; therefore, it should not be commodified, privatized or traded for commercial purposes. These rights must be enshrined at all levels of government. In particular, an international treaty must ensure these principles are noncontrovertable.

Water is best protected by local communities and citizens, who must be respected as equal partners with governments in the protection and regulation of water. Peoples of the Earth are the only vehicle to promote democracy and save water.

Similarly, all the Earth natural resources belong to Global Community to be used, developed and protected for the maximum benefit of the people and of all life.

Global Community has many expert groups able to begin the necessary intergovernmental negotiations towards establishing alternative revenue sources, which could include fees for the commercial use of the oceans, fees for airplane use of the skies, fees for use of the electromagnetic spectrum, fees levied on foreign exchange transactions, and a tax on carbon content of fuels.

This thinking should give us a fresh start for a better future and bring some light to understanding previous claims of the many different groups such as:

• Native and aboriginal people claiming that their ancestors owned the land so now they do



• God gave it to us so the land is ours



• Property ownership system of the Roman Empire to today, our social-economic system of land owership



• The military power of this world forcing ownership of land and of all other Earth natural resources against the will of everyone else

None of the above groups can claim ownership of the land and other Earth natural resources. They never did own the land and of all other Earth natural resources. And they never will.

Only Global Community can rightfully claim ownership of the Earth.

Perhaps it is time to leave behind the concept of 'nation'. It has confusing meanings and has been over-used in many situations and by everyone. Is it truly necessary to discuss about it? I dont think so. Let us move on to the twenty first century. Global Community has researched and developed new global concepts more appropriate to our times. The concept of 'a global community' is one of them and is certainly a powerful new concept that will make its place in history.

Earth Government has established the criteria of 'a global community of a million people'. There is no need of having a piece of land at all costs. We have shown that a community is not about a piece of land you acquired by force or otherwise. A typical global community may be what a group of people, together, wants it to be. It can be a group of people with the same values. It can be a group of people with the same cultural background, or the same religious background. Or it can be people with different values, cultural background or religious values and beliefs. The people making a global community may be living in many different locations on the planet. With today's communications it is easy to group people in this fashion. It can be a village, or two villages together where people have decided to unite as one global community. The two villages may be found in different parts of the world. It can be a town, a city, or a nation. It can be two or more nations together.

Global Community is thus more fluid and dynamic.

We need to let go the archaic ways of seeing a community as the street where we live and contained by a border. It is best for humanity and the increasing world population to see ourselves as people living together or far apart but in constant communication with each other. A community has no boundaries except of those of the heart, mind and Soul. Many conflicts and wars will be avoided by seeing ourselves as people with a heart, a mind and a Soul (a global community), and as part of a community with the same. A global symbiotical relationship between two or more nations, or between two or more global communities, can have trade as the major aspect of the relationship or it can have as many other aspects as agreed by the people involved. The fundamental criteria is that a relationship is created for the good of all groups participating in the relationship and for the good of humanity, all life on Earth. The relationship allows a global equitable and peaceful development and a more stable and inclusive global economy.

The emphasis of a global symbiotical relationship is not so much on how much money a nation should have or how high a GDP should be although money can be made a part of the relationship. We all know developed countries live off developing countries so the emphasis has no need to stress out the profit a rich nation is making off a poor nation. The emphasis of the relationship should give more importance to the other aspects such as quality of life, protection of the environment and of the global life-support systems, the entrenchment of the Scale of Global Rights and Global Law into our ways of life, justice, peace, cultural and spiritual freedom, security, and many other important aspects as described in the global ministries (health, agriculture, energy, trade, resources, etc.).

Global Community has shown that a global community can be united by religion to form a Global Government (GG). It does not have to be a democracy. A GG based on religion is very acceptable to Earth Government . People can unite in any way they wish.

A global community is not about a piece of land you acquired by force or otherwise. One could think of a typical global community of a million people that does not have to be bounded by a geographical or political border. It can be a million people living in many different locations all over the world. Global Community is thus more fluid and dynamic. We need to let go the archaic ways of seeing a community as the street where I live and contained by a border. Many conflicts and wars will be avoided by seeing ourselves as people with a heart, a mind and a Soul, and as part of a community with the same.

The old concept of a community being the street where we live in and surrounded by a definite geographical and political boundary has originated during the Roman Empire period. An entire new system of values was then created to make things work for the Roman Empire. Humanity has lived with this concept over two thousand years. Peoples from all over the world are ready to kill anyone challenging their border. They say that this is their land, their property, their 'things'. This archaic concept is endangering humanity and its survival. The Roman Empire has gone but its culture is still affecting us today. We need to let go the old way of thinking. We need to learn of the new concept, and how it can make things work in the world.

A typical global community may be what a group of people, together, wants it to be. It can be a group of people sharing with the same values. It can be a group of people with the same cultural background, or the same religious background. Or they can be people with totally different backgrounds and beliefs. The people making a global community may be living in many different locations on the planet. With today's communications it is easy to group people in this fashion. It can be a village, or two villages together where people have decided to unite as one community. The two villages may be found in different parts of the world. It can be a town, a city, or a nation. It can be two or more nations together.

The number of people making a typical global community becomes important when a democratic election to elect representatives to Global Community is going on. The voting system of the Global Community is very simple and practical. One representative per million people. A global community of 300 million people would have three hundred representatives.

The political system of an individual country does not have to be a democracy. Political rights of a country belong to that country alone. Democracy is not to be enforced by anyone and to anyone or to any global community. Every community can and should choose the political system of their choice with the understanding of the importance of such a right on the Scale of Global Rights . On the other hand, representatives to Global Community must be elected democratically in every part of the world. An individual country may have any political system at home but the government of that country will have to ensure (and allow verification by Global Community ) that representatives to Global Community have been elected democratically. This way, every person in the world can claim the birth right of electing a democratic government to manage Earth: the rights to vote and elect representatives to form Global Community .

The power of Global Community was de-centralized to give each GG a better chance to find the right solutions to global issues. It can act faster and be more effective and efficient in the context of Global Community, this great, wide, wonderful world made of all these diverse global communities within each Nation. Global Community becomes thus more fluid and dynamic. A global symbiotical relationship is created between Nations and Global Community for the good of all groups participating in the relationship and for the good of humanity, all life on Earth. The relationship allows a global equitable and peaceful development. This is the basic concept that is allowing us to group willing Member Nations from different parts of the world. A typical example is the Global Government of North America (GGNA).

As we have shown in the Global Constitution, Global Community is defined as being all that exits or occurs at any location at any time between the Ozone layer above and the core of the planet below. This is an important concept and particularly useful in the context of the Global Governments Federation. A community is not about a piece of land you acquired by force or otherwise. One could think of a typical community of a million people that does not have to be bounded by a geographical or political border. It can be a million people living in many different locations all over the world. The Global Community is thus more fluid and dynamic. We need to let go the archaic ways of seeing a community as the street where I live and contained by a border. Many conflicts and wars will be avoided by seeing ourselves as people with a heart, a mind and a Soul, and as part of a community with the same. Global Community is this great, wide, wonderful world made of all these diverse global communities.

A global symbiotical relationship between two or more nations, or between two or more global communities, can have trade as the major aspect of the relationship or it can have as many other aspects as agreed by the people involved. The fundamental criteria is that a relationship is created for the good of all groups participating in the relationship and for the good of humanity, all life on Earth. The relationship allows a global equitable and peaceful development.

This is the basic concept that is allowing us to group Member Nations from different parts of the world. For example, the Global Government of North America can be made of willing Member Nations such as Canada, the United States, Mexico, Great britain, the Territories, and include the North Pole region.

Global Community allows people to take control of their own lives. Global Community was built from a grassroots process with a vision for humanity that is challenging every person on Earth as well as nation governments. Global Community has a vision of the people working together building a new civilization including a healthy and rewarding future for the next generations. Global cooperation brings people together for a common future for the good of all.

Earth governance does not imply a lost of state sovereignty and territorial integrity. A nation government exists within the framework of an effective Global Community protecting common global values and humanity heritage. Earth governance gives a new meaning to the notions of territoriality, and non-intervention in a state way of life, and it is about protecting the cultural heritage of a state. Diversity of cultural and ethnic groups is an important aspect of Earth governance.

Earth governance is a balance between the rights of states with rights of people, and the interests of nations with the interests of the Global Community, the human family, the global civil society.

Earth governance is about the rights of states to self-determination in the global context of Global Community rather than the traditional context of a world of separate states.

" Global Community is defined as being all that exits or occurs at any location at any time between the Ozone layer above and the core of the planet below."

This is the fundamental definition of the expression "Global Community". This definition includes all people, all life on Earth. It also implicitly says that no-one in particular owns the Earth but we all own it together. Not just us people, but all life on Earth owns it. The beginning of life stretches as far back as 4 billion years, and so Life claims its birthright of ownership of Earth, and so does the Soul of all Life, the Soul of Humanity. The land ownership of the Earth means ownership of the land and of all other Earth natural resources.

"A global community" is not about a piece of land you acquired by force or otherwise. One could think of a typical community that does not have to be bounded by a geographical or political border. It can be people living in many different locations all over the world. Global Community is thus more fluid and dynamic. We need to let go the archaic ways of seeing a community as the street where we live and contained by a border. Many conflicts and wars will be avoided by seeing ourselves as people with a heart, a mind and a Soul, and as part of a community with the same.

The old concept of a community being the street where we live in and surrounded by a definite geographical and political boundary has originated during the Roman Empire period. An entire new system of values was then created to make things work for the Roman Empire. Humanity has lived with this concept over two thousand years. Peoples from all over the world are ready to kill anyone challenging their border. They say that this is their land, their property, their 'things'. This archaic concept is endangering humanity and its survival. The Roman Empire has gone but its culture is still affecting us today. We need to let go the old way of thinking. We need to learn of the new concept, and how it can make things work in the world.

A typical community may be what a group of people, together, wants it to be. It can be a group of people sharing with the same values. It can be a group of people with the same cultural background, or the same religious background. Or they can be people with totally different backgrounds and beliefs. The people making a global community may be living in many different locations on the planet. With today's communications it is easy to group people in this fashion. It can be a village, or two villages together where people have decided to unite as one community. The two villages may be found in different parts of the world. It can be a town, a city, or a nation. It can be two or more nations together.

Following this thinking we see land ownership is no longer a problem. The Earth and all its natural resources belong to all the "global communities" contained therein. A village, or a city is "a global community" and owns the land around its boundaries. Along with Global Community, it has ownership of all natural resources within its boundaries.

As mentioned above, land here, by definition, covers all naturally occurring resources like surface land, the air, minerals deposits (gold, oil and gas etc), water, electromagnetic spectrum, the trees, fish in the seas and rivers. It is unjust to treat land as private property or a commodity. Land is not a product of labor. Everyone should therefore be given equal access to all natural resources.

On the global level the Law of the Seas Covenant is an example of a global community lease payment basis for public needs as it has affirmed that ocean resources are the common heritage of all and a proper source of funding for global institutions. Water belongs to the Earth and all species and is sacred to life therefore, the world’s water must be conserved, reclaimed and protected for all future generations and its natural patterns respected.

Water is a fundamental human right and a public trust to be guarded by all levels of government; therefore, it should not be commodified, privatized or traded for commercial purposes. These rights must be enshrined at all levels of government. In particular, an international treaty must ensure these principles are noncontrovertable.

Water is best protected by local communities and citizens, who must be respected as equal partners with governments in the protection and regulation of water. Peoples of the Earth are the only vehicle to promote democracy and save water.

Similarly, all the Earth natural resources belong to Global Community to be used, developed and protected for the maximum benefit of the people and of all life.

Global Community has many expert groups able to begin the necessary intergovernmental negotiations towards establishing alternative revenue sources, which could include fees for the commercial use of the oceans, fees for airplane use of the skies, fees for use of the electromagnetic spectrum, fees levied on foreign exchange transactions, and a tax on carbon content of fuels.

This thinking should give us a fresh start for a better future and bring some light to understanding previous claims of the many different groups such as:

• Native and aboriginal people claiming that their ancestors owned the land so now they do



• God gave it to us so the land is ours



• Property ownership system of the Roman Empire to today, our social-economic system of land owership



• The military power of this world forcing ownership of land and of all other Earth natural resources against the will of everyone else

None of the above groups can claim ownership of the land and other Earth natural resources. They never did own the land and of all other Earth natural resources. And they never will.

Only Global Community can rightfully claim ownership of the Earth.

In the case of Nunavut, we see land ownership is a significant problem. We have said that the Earth and all its natural resources belong to all the "global communities" contained therein. A village, or a city is "a global community" and owns the land around its boundaries. Along with Global Community, it has ownership of all natural resources within its boundaries.

The fundamental criteria is that a relationship is created for the good of all groups participating in the relationship and for the good of humanity, all life on Earth. The relationship allows a global equitable and peaceful development and a more stable and inclusive global economy.

A global symbiotical relationship is created between nations and Global Community for the good of all groups participating in the relationship and for the good of humanity, all life on Earth. The relationship allows a global equitable and peaceful development. This is the basic concept that is allowing us to group willing Member Nations from different parts of the world. And that is the major problem with Nunavut. The Inuit people are trying very hard to keep control over a territory that is much too large and important for other nations. It is not possible to claim ownership of Nunavut when it was never yours except in your dreams. It is like putting a flag on the Moon and say the Moon is all yours. Or going to Mars and say Mars is all yours. No one owns the Moon or Mars, or the Earth. No one ever did! And no one ever will! All you can say is that you put a flag on the Moon. Nothing more, nothing less! It is also like going on top of Mount Everest in the Himalayas. Just by climbing to the top does not give you ownership of the mountain.

Every single human being must deal responsibly with the affairs going on in his (her) own 'global community' ~ when a person takes personal responsibility for his own affairs ~ he becomes empowered as a person. He can then reach beyond his own property and family, and help to work with others living in and around, even a part of the local community he lives in ~ the villages, the town community, the surrounding territory, and so on.

The key is personal responsibility. Therefore the individual is the important element, one who takes responsibility for his community. This individual cares about jobs, homes, streets, the welfare and success of his community.

When a group of ordinary people realized they, personally, will make the changes they need in their fields, in their village. They can then find ways to bring these changes for all. There is a wisdom in the ways of very humble people that needs to be used. Every humble person deserves to have ideas respected, the courage to develop his own life for the better and for the good of all. Sound solutions to help manage and sustain Earth will very likely be found this way. Everyone can help assess the needs of the planet now and propose sound solutions for its proper management, present and future. The reasoning for the creation of new human settlements in Nunavut is that Nunavut territory covers 772,260 sq mi (2,000,671 sq km) and has a population of only about 30,000 spread over that area. The population density of Nunavut is thus 0.015 persons per square kilometer. The capital and largest town has a population of about 5000. So 1/6 of the entire population is found in an area of about 1000 sq km. The territory of Nunavut hardly qualifies to be a global community. I cannot say it is. The capital may qualify if it satisfies the test of being sustainable, without the federal government help, and the test of having a symbiotical relationship with Global Community.

Now the territory is effectively controlled by the Inuit people, who make up 85% of the population. This implies the Inuit people controls the government of Nunavut. In order to become a global community the government of Nunavut would have to help with the creation of several new large settlements over the entire area of Nunavut. That is to ask Canadians and people from other nations to move in and help them to settle in Nunavut.

In the pass, the Canadian Government took advantage of the Inuit to further its sovereignty agenda while ignoring their suggestions and demands. The importance of an equal partnership between the federal government and the Inuit regarding a future Northern Strategy should not have been underestimated. The Inuit have a very practical interest in stewardship in the North. The Canada’s Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act is a good start, but without the ability to enforce this Act at present, the likelihood of protecting Northern resources is unlikely.

The definition of sovereignty helps in understanding Canada's position. Sovereignty implies control, authority over a territory. The concept of state sovereignty is embedded in international law. Traditionally, this definition reflects a state’s right to jurisdictional control, territorial integrity, and non-interference by outside states. Sovereignty implies both undisputed supremacy over the land’s inhabitants and independence from unwanted intervention by an outside authority.

However, sovereignty has also been increasingly defined in terms of state responsibility. This includes a state’s exercise of control and authority over its territory, and the perception of this control and authority by other states. Sovereignty is thus linked to the maintenance of international security. Former National Defence Minister Bill Graham has stated that 'Sovereignty is a question of exercising, actively, your responsibilities in an area'.

Another important dimension of the assertion of Canadian sovereignty includes stewardship, an issue that has been raised by Canada’s northern Inuit and Aboriginal peoples. Specifically, use and occupancy by Canada’s northern inhabitants is significant in terms of the validity of Canada’s sovereign claims.

Canada’s legal position is sound today but as the ice melts, there is the genuine fear that this sovereignty will float away with the pack ice. However there are actions that can be taken and factors that could mitigate against a legal challenge.

Protectionist sentiments apply to both Canada and the US when it comes to the Passage but for Canada, the concern for Arctic sovereignty is deep-seated. The claim of sovereignty over the artic archipelago is uniquely tied to Canada’s sense of national pride and identity and therefore, any suggestions or actions that endanger the government’s exclusive authority over the disputed territory sparks an emotional and defensive response. Canada’s sovereignty in the Arctic embraces land, sea and ice. It extends without interruption to the seaward - facing coasts of the Arctic islands. These islands are joined by the waters between them. Inuit people have used and occupied the ice as they have used and occupied the land.

The difficulty for Canada is that many, including the Americans believe insufficient resources and personnel have been dedicated to the Arctic to demonstrate a significant presence thereby weakening its sovereignty claim. Weak resources translate into a weak claim.

During the Cold War, lacking the finances and manpower, Canada had little choice but to turn to the United States for military presence and weapons. These collaborative defence efforts to guard against a common nuclear threat, while maximizing Canada’s security, also maximized Canada’s potential loss of sovereignty. This fact has not been forgotten.

It all means that Canada and Nunavut must invite and help settlers from around the world to come to Nunavut. It is the only way Canada can use the 'community' card in its claim of sovereighty and of ownership of the land and of all its natural resources, including the control of the Northwest Passage.

This is not an easy call. Many times in the past Global Community has asked the people of Israel to settle in Nunavut but we never got an answer. It just seemed that they would rather to continue to be at war with the people of the Middle East and surrounding nations whom, we know, dont want them in Palestine, then to move in the richest and most peaceful country in world.

Part 48. We are all members of Global Community. We all have the duty to protect the rights and welfare of all species and all people. No humans have the right to encroach on the ecological space of other species and other people, or treat them with cruelty and violence.

Part 49. All species, humans and cultures have intrinsic worth. They are subjects, not objects of manipulation or ownership. No humans have the right to own other species, other people or the knowledge of other cultures through patents and other intellectual property rights.

Part 50. Defending biological and cultural diversity is a duty of all people. Diversity is an end in itself, a value, a source of richness both material and cultural.

Part 51. All members of Global Community including all humans have the right to sustenance -- to food and water, to safe and clean habitat, to security of ecological space. These rights are natural rights, they are birthrights given by the fact of existence on earth and are best protected through community rights and commons. They are not given by states or corporations, nor can they be extinguished by state or corporate action. No state or corporation has the right to erode or undermine these natural rights or enclose the commons that sustain all through privatisation or monopoly control.

• safety and security
• have shelter
• 'clean' energy
• a 'clean' and healthy environment
• drink fresh water
• breath clean air
• eat a balance diet and
• basic clothing.

Section  3.    The ecological rights, the protection of the global life-support systems and the primordial human rights of future generations

Concerning Sections 4, 5 and 6, it shall be the aim of Earth Government to secure these other rights for all global citizens within the federation of all nations, but without immediate guarantee of universal achievement and enforcement. These rights are defined as Directive Principles, obligating the Earth Government to pursue every reasonable means for universal realization and implementation.

Section  4.    Community rights, rights of direct democracy, the right that the greatest number of people has by virtue of its number (50% plus one) and after voting representatives democratically

Section  5.    Economic rights (business and consumer rights, and their responsibilities and accountabilities) and social rights (civil and political rights)

Section  6.    Cultural rights and religious rights

Chapter 10.3     Section  1.    Ecological rights and the protection of the global life-support systems

Article 8:    Conservation of natural resources
Conservation of those natural resources of Earth which are limited so that present and future generations may continue to enjoy life on the planet Earth.
Article 9:    The rights that Global Community has in protecting the global life-support systems
Earth rights are ecological rights and the rights that Global Community has in protecting the global life-support systems. Earth rights are those rights that demonstrate the connection between human well-being and a sound environment. They include individuals and global communities human rights and the rights to a clean environment, and participation in development decisions. We define ecological rights as those rights of the ecosystem of the Earth beyond human purpose. They are those rights that protect and preserve the ecological heritage of the Earth for future generations. The biggest challenge for social democracy today is to articulate coherent policies based on a unifying vision for society.

The major problems to address include:

A.     the enormous worldwide wealth gap and the underlying concentration of land and natural resource ownership and control;
B.     the privatized monetary structures; and
C.     building global governance institutions and financing governance and development in such a way as to divert funds from military industrial profits and into social development and environmental restoration.

We need a basic clarification of First Principles on the concept of "ownership", starting with the principle that the land and natural resources of the planet are a common heritage and belong equally as a birthright to everyone. Products and services created by individuals are properly viewed as private property. Products and services created by groups of individuals are properly viewed as collective property.

We can hatch many birds out of one egg when we shift public finance OFF of private property and ONTO common heritage property. From the local to the global level we need to shift taxes off of labor and productive capital and onto land and natural resource rents. In other words, we need to privatize labor (wages) and socialize rent (the value of surface land and natural resources). This public finance shift will promote the cooperatization of the ownership of capital in a gradual way with minimal government control of the production and exchange of individual and collective wealth. Natural monopolies (infrastructure, energy, public transportation) should be owned and/or controlled or regulated by government at the most local level that is practical.

The levels of this public finance shift can be delineated thusly: municipalities and localities to collect the surface land rents within their jurisdiction. Regional governing bodies to collect resource rents for forest lands, mineral, oil and water resources; the global level needs a Global Resource Agency to collect user fees for transnational commons such as satellite geostationary orbits, royalties on minerals mined or fish caught in international waters and the use of the electromagnetic spectrum.

An added benefit of this form of public finance is that it provides a peaceful way to address conflicts over land and natural resources. Resource rents should be collected and equitably distributed and utilized for the benefit of all, either in financing social services and/or in direct citizen dividends in equal amount to all individuals.

A portion of revenues could pass from the lower to the higher governance levels or vice versa as needed to ensure a just development pattern worldwide and needed environmental restoration.

In the area of monetary policy we need seignorage reform, which means that money should be issued as spending by governments, not as debt by private banking institutions. We also need guaranteed economic freedoms to create local and regional currencies on a democratic and transparent basis.

Policies for securing earth rights are:

1.     It is better to tax "bads" rather than "goods". Governments have long used selective taxation to discourage use of alcohol and cigarettes, while unprocessed food and children¹s clothing remain tax-free. It is best to continue this tradition with selective "eco-sin taxes" to discourage a wide range of grey products and lifestyles. At the same time, taxes would be eliminated on green products and lifestyles. People should be able to avoid taxation by choosing green products and lifestyles.

2.    Taxes should be designed to conserve resources and energy. Rather than taxing jobs and profits, taxes should be moved to resource use and energy consumption to reward conservation. The community should benefit from the use of commonly held resources. Using resources is a privilege, not a right, and the user should pay for the privilege. Resources must also be shared with future generations and other species.

3.     Taxes should be designed to increase employment. Moving taxes onto resources and land use and off of incomes will make people less expensive to employ. Products produced by green production methods, which tends to use fewer resources and less energy will avoid taxation. As energy costs rise, the price of labour becomes more economical, and green products which tend to encourage value-added processes, will provide more high quality, skilled jobs than resource intensive products.

4.     Distributive taxes are preferable to re-distributive taxes. If wealth is distributed more fairly in the first place less re-distribution will be necessary. Eliminating consumption taxes will eliminate the only tax the poor must pay. By moving taxes on to resource use and land, the poor, who generally own less land and use fewer resources, will avoid taxation, thus requiring less redistribution. Taxing land but not the use of land, will reduce taxation on higher density housing, lowering housing costs for low-income citizens, thus reducing another need for re-distribution.

5.     Resource taxes should be assessed as early as possible. Resources should be taxed before entering the manufacturing process in order to green all aspects of the manufacturing process from extraction to the finished product. Increasing taxes on resource and energy use will encourage resource and energy efficiency, innovation, reuse, repair, recycling, and used material recovery.

6.     Taxing unearned income is preferable to taxing earned income. The tax shift to resource use and community-generated land values will distribute income more fairly without dependence on income and business taxation to redistribute income. Taxing unearned income (resources, and not earned income (jobs, profits) will reduce the rich-poor gap since the rich are always in a better position to capture unearned or windfall income by their ability to hold assets that they do not have to consume.

7.     Green tax shifting is revenue-neutral, not a tax break or tax grab. The taxes paid by businesses and individuals collectively will not change, but greener businesses and consumers will reduce their taxes. Grey businesses and consumers will pay higher taxes. Studies have shown that 50% of businesses and consumers will be unaffected or only slightly affected by tax shifting, roughly one quarter will realize tax reductions one quarter will be taxed more.

8.     Resource use and community-generated land value taxation are fairer. Resource use and land taxes are much simpler to collect and harder to evade than taxes on income and business profits. Since there are far fewer points of taxation than with traditional tax sources, a move to resource use and land taxation will reduce the size of the underground economy. The difficulty of evading these taxes will reduce the problem of overseas tax havens.

9.     Green taxation increases international competitiveness. Eliminating taxes on domestic labour will reduce labour costs in Ontario and therefore reduce out-sourcing by businesses seeking cheap labour in other countries or provinces.

10.     Pay for what you take, not for what you make. Businesses should not be taxed for hiring people or for earning a profit, but should be charged for using resources and polluting the planet. People should not be taxed for earning an income or purchasing products but should be charged for the value of land they own and the resources used in the products they buy. Resource use and polluting are privileges not rights, and businesses and consumers should pay for these privileges.

11.     Taxing community-generated land values is beneficial. Since the community around it, not its owner, creates the value of land, the community should receive the benefits it has created. The owner is entitled to a fair profit but not to a windfall profit that rightfully belongs to the community that generated the wealth in the first place. Under LVT the specific use of the land will not be taxed, only the land itself, within the existing zoning. Community-generated land value taxation encourages the efficient use of land, reduces sprawl, reduces speculation, tends to reduce land prices and improves land use patterns.

12.     Taxes should encourage local, sustainable, value-added production over imports. Culturally unique products and services will be valued by green tax reform over mass production. The sale price should include the true costs of products, services and distances traveled, and should be designed to encourage local, sustainable production.

13.     Taxes should break up monopolies. The most important monopolies are resource monopolies and land monopolies. When a person or a business has control or exclusive rights over large amounts of a resource or large amounts of land, this person or business reaps windfall profits, which is unjust. These resources and this land belong to the community and if individuals are granted access to it they should pay a fair price for this privilege or right. Land Value Taxation aims to ensure that the wealth created by usage of land and resources that rightfully belong to the community accrue back to that community.

14.     Taxes should be applied only once. Rather than taxing the same wealth repeatedly through personal income, business income, sales, re-sale, interest, capital gains, property transfer, inheritance, taxation should only impact the use of a resource and the ownership of land on a sustained basis (ie property tax on site value).

15.     MINIMIZING INCOME TAXES

a)     Moving taxes off of incomes and onto resource use and community-generated land value is critical in order to achieve and maintain a green economy and society.

b)     Traditionally governments tax the component of production in least supply. In the first half of the 20th century labour was scarce and resources and land were plentiful and indeed considered infinite, so it made sense for government to tax incomes and not resource use or land. Now, however, resources and land are scarce and labour is plentiful, so governments should modernize the tax structure by switching the source of taxation away from incomes and onto resources use and land.

c)     Income taxes are a regressive tax since they tax a "good" not a "bad". Since jobs are desirable we should not tax employment. Income taxes are a disincentive to employment since they make people expensive to employ. Employers often avoid taxation by employing fewer people and opting instead for energy-intensive, chemical-intensive and resource-intensive production. Conversely, taxing resource and land lightly sends the message that these community-held resources are unimportant and may be squandered by anyone without consequences.

d)     It is claimed that income taxes help reduce economic inequity among people. This is untrue since employers simply pass on the extra payroll deduction to consumers. The amount of income tax paid is irrelevant to labour negotiations, since bargaining is based on net pay, not gross pay. In determining an employee's worth, the employer simply calculates the gross amount based on take-home pay. Salaries of high worth employees and CEOs are simply raised to the level necessary to ensure net pay reaches the desired level.

e)     In contrast the rich-poor gap will be narrowed more effectively by moving taxes off of incomes and onto resource and land use, since wealthier people who choose to spend their money on grey products and lifestyles will be taxed more while people with lower incomes will be able to avoid taxation by living green. In addition, replacing income taxes with green taxes would help conserve resources, save energy, foster value-added and labour intensive production (ie. more jobs), and reduce pollution.

16.     MINIMIZING BUSINESS TAXES

a)     Neither the right wing call for corporate tax cuts nor the left-wing mantra of increased corporate taxes will engender a transition to a just or green society. Reducing or increasing taxes on corporate profits is green-neutral (taxes which neither encourage nor discourage greening the planet). If the goal is for businesses to succeed and employ people, it makes no sense to apply business taxes or payroll deductions.

b)     Moving taxes off of profits and employment and onto the resources, land and pollution will speed progress toward a green industrial economy. Recourse use and pollution are privileges not rights, and businesses should pay for these privileges. While business people would prefer not to pollute the planet or squander resources, the present tax structure gives them little choice. Businesses usually follow the path of least tax resistance and will readily go green if tax incentives pointed the way.

c)     Green production means more jobs, resource conservation, and less pollution. Ecological fiscal reform and green tax shifting are revenue neutral; the collective tax burden paid by business is unchanged, but it will reward businesses that go green and discourage businesses that remain grey.

17.     PHASE OUT CONSUMPTION TAXES

a)     Sales taxes are unhelpful in moving to a green society since socially useful and ecologically sound products are taxed equally to socially or ecologically detrimental products. To reduce consumption of resources, taxes should be applied early in the manufacturing process in order to green all aspects of the manufacturing process. Taxing early will dramatically reduce the ticket price of green products and raise the price of grey products, positively influencing consumer behaviour. Taxing early will encourage resource and energy efficiency, innovation, reuse, repair, recycling, and used material recovery.

b)     Sales taxes are regressive since they discourage people from making both green and grey purchases, thus damaging the economy and killing jobs. As well sales taxes are often unfairly evaded by the underground economy, while resource use, pollution and land rent levies, by contrast, are simpler to apply and more difficult to evade.

18.     RESOURCE USE TAXATION

a)     Income taxes, consumptions taxes, and taxes on profits are all green-neutral, ie. green jobs, green purchases and green profits are taxed at the same rate as grey jobs, grey purchases and grey profits. By contrast, resources taxes levied early in the production process foster conservation, efficiencies, innovation, value-added production, and labour-intensive production. Local sustainable production, short run niche production, and skilled trades and crafts receive a bias since the full costs of transportation and mass production are internalized.

b)     Taxing resources minimizes waste and pollution thus reducing the load on government for health care costs, waste disposal costs, transportation infrastructure, and pollution cleanup costs. The market will drive resource and energy conservation without government micro-management.

c)     Resource taxation would focus on a small number of key local resources and a small number of imported resources

Article 10:    To build a sustainable global community
In order to build a sustainable global community, each individual, each local community, and national governments of the world must initiate their commitment to the Global Community, fulfill their obligations under existing international agreements, and support the implementation of Constitution principles with an international legally binding instrument on environment and development.
Article 11:    Every individual, family, organization, and community has a vital role to play
Life often involves tensions between important values. This can mean difficult choices. However, we must find ways to harmonize diversity with unity, the exercise of freedom with the common good, short-term objectives with long-term goals. Every individual, family, organization, and community has a vital role to play. The arts, sciences, religions, educational institutions, media, businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and governments are all called to offer creative leadership. The partnership of government, civil society, and business is essential for effective governance. In order to build a sustainable global community, each individual, each local community, and national governments of the world must initiate their commitment to the Global Community, fulfill their obligations under existing international agreements, and support the implementation of Global Constitution principles with an international legally binding instrument on environment and development.

No one could own the Moon, planet Mars, or America just by going there and back

All the technology in the world to get to the Moon, and now Mars, all the hard work, all the sweat and pain endured, and more, much more, to finally put a flag on the Moon. Amazing human achievement! We can really be proud of a team that did it.

Just like the first European explorers who discovered America, they arrived and conquered. Natives did not have a chance. Natives said America was their home. But no longer! The explorers said it is now ours. Most Natives were hot in the USA. More survived in Canada! Explorers were not doing this hard work just for the pleasure of finding something new. Their countries sent them and pay for their expenses. Explorers were expected to find something tangible that could make their countries proud and rich.

How does this relate to Canada's sovereighty in the North?

The question should be how does this relate to ownership of the Earth?

Does putting a flag on the Moon gives you ownership of the Moon?

Does putting a flag on Mars gives you ownership of the planet?

Does discovering the Americas by explorers gave them ownership of the Americas?

Does climbing Mount Everest gives ownership of the mountain?

Does Canada own the Northwest Passage or Nunavut?

In 1933, the Permanent Court of International Justice declared the legal status of Greenland in favour of Denmark. The status of Hans Island was not addressed. However, decades later, Denmark would claim that geological evidence pointed to Hans Island being part of Greenland, and that it belongs to Denmark by extension of the Court's ruling.

Does Denmark truly owns Greenland? Just because you say you do? Just because the Permanent Court of International Justice say you do? What if the Court was wrong or corrupted?

Canada says it owns the Northwest Passage and Nunavut but how is that possible? Just because Canada says it does? Or because the United Nations say it does? What if the UN is corrupted? or wrong?

Obviously we know the answers to all thes questions. You dont own it. You never did and never will.

Only Global Community can rightfully claim ownership.

Just like the first European explorers who discovered America, they arrived and conquered. Natives did not have a chance. Natives said America was their home. But no longer! The explorers said it is now ours. Most Natives were shot in the USA. More survived in Canada! Explorers were not doing this hard work just for the pleasure of finding something new. Their countries sent them and pay for their expenses. Explorers were expected to find something tangible that could make their countries proud and rich.

Truly, we are on the threshold of a global revolution, and we need to proceed with the non-violent approach. We need to build an economic democracy based firmly on the basic principle that the Earth belongs equally to everyone as a birthright. The Earth is for all people to labor and live on and should never be the possession of any individual, corporation, or uncaring government, any more than the air or water, or any other Earth natural resources. An individual, or a business should have no more than is needed for a healthy living.

The impacts of our democracy are destroying the Earth global life-support systems. A few people have control over so much of the Earth. To live in a world at peace and have conditions of basic justice and fairness in human interactions, our democratic values must based in the principle of equal rights to the Earth.

Territorial conflict has for millennium been the basis of war and mass killing of others. Throughout the ages wars been fought over land, and other Earth natural resources. We have seen oil conflictsin the Persian Gulf, and the Caspian Sea Basin. We have seen water conflicts in the Nile Basin, the Jordan, and Indus River Basins. We have seen wars being fought over minerals and timber in Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Congo, New Guinea, and Borneo. We have seen conflicts over valuable gems, minerals and timber in Brazil, Angola, Cambodia, Columbia, Congo, Liberia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The view from space shows us a global landscape in which competition over resources is the governing principle behind the use of military power. Truly, resources have become the new political boundaries.

Each day taxpayers hand over astronomical amounts of money to build weapons of mass destruction, fuel dangerous and polluting technologies, and subsidize giant corporations which concentrate the wealth and power of the world in the hands of an elite few.

There is a way to share the Earth? The Global Economic Model proposed by Global Community is truly the best response to the world.

Today we have a situation in the Middle East whereby the USA has been invading the area ever since 1947 when it has coerced the United Nations to create the State of Israel, its Trojan Horse for the invasion. Israel and the USA together have been at war with the people of the Middle East and of surrounding nations ever since.

Osama Bin Laden is actually a prophet in his own ways, a freedom fighter, not a terrorist. He objected to the invasion by Russia during the Cold War. America was quite please to get his help in those days. Actually he was being help by the Americans to get rid of the Russians. It is a question of who help who. He also objected to be invaded by Americans, to our ways of life, our consumer driven society, a 'waste land' found in the West.

Soon the production of oil and gas will decline rapidly. Global Community Assessment Centre (GCAC) has analyzed the total production of oil and gas in the world and found the peak had already been attained and production should decline steadily over the coming 40 years. Humanity will have completely consumed the oil and gas reserves in the world between 50 and 100 years from now. This explain why there is so much rush for those resources by countries such America in Iraq, and India, Russia, China and Europe in Iran. Actually they are all over the Middle East but everyone seems to have chosen a specific territory to invade or exploit: America in Iraq, the others in Iran. What we have here are all the ingredients needed for World War III. Let me invade this nation says America, and I will invade the other ones say Russia and China. They will be there until all the oil and gas reserves have been suck up from the ground. If one of them is not happy then we will have a war. They have all agreed that Iraquis and Iranians are casualities of war.

So what is the Canadian military doing in Afghanistan in a war-like mission?

In its own way, our military is telling President Bush we are supporting the American effort of wanting a democratic Middle East. At least this is the lie to the American people. President Bush, the Commander in Chief of the United States of America has been telling so many lies to the American people that no one knows who is telling the truth. Even our military does not know. So our military follows the big guys with more muscles and more guns, the mother of the biggest guns, the USA.

So now why would we need to have our military back home?

In two generations from now most civilizations on the planet will be facing terrible problems: the end of the oil and gas production, the end of our consumer driven society as no oil and gas means no plastic base products, which also implies no jobs and chaos everywhere in the wolrd. We will literally be invaded by Americans. Poverty and diseases will be widespread. The environment will be completely out of control. Global warming will cause tremendous environmental and climate change problems. Nothing we could ever imagine will happen. Gangs in Canada will be controlling cities much like warlords in Afghanistan. Not even the military could stop them from committing crimes. Government will be corrupted. Somewhat like the situation we see in Iraq today but 100 times worst. And the world will never get any better. I will show here that our so called 'modern civilizations' will collapse. Our own civilization is base on oil and gas, and on the products we get from the oil and gas, mainly plastics, and not on principles and values.

So why do we need our military back home?

We need our military back home because we need to prepare for what is coming in about 40 years. Our own grand-children will become terrorists. Osama Bin Laden, the prophet, was a civilian at first who could see the arm of an invasion, and he fought back. Al Qua'ida 'terrorists' are mostly young civilians who are ready to fight back by becoming suicide bombers. I believe their are other ways to fight back, at least for us here in Canada. We must find our own brand of solutions. We have time to prepare for what is coming sooner or later in a few generations. We need politicians that can see at least two generations ahead of us. We need to start now, today. Bring back our military from Afghanistan. Let us plan ahead together. Let us build our own Global Community of North America. Let us use our tax dollars in education, research for alternative energy solutions. Workable technologies are available today but left on shelves. Let us use them to make up for the lack of oil and gas. If nothing else works enough, let us build nuclear power plants. Several of them! Canada's Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) is certaily a good start but needs to be upgraded to handle large crowds in need of help right here in Canada, in North America, and elsewhere in the world if we can.

I dont want Canada to have anything to do with the Americans stand in the Middle East and have to side with them in a World War. I want Canada out of NATO now.

But now we have made ourselves a target by those who dont want Americans to be in the Middle East. We thought about the Al Qua'ida 'terrorists' as suicide bombers and truly hated Americans. The Al Qua'ida 'terrorits' want Americans out of the region. The reality is that Osama Bin Laden fought along with the American in Afghanistan to force the Russians out of the region. The question is what were Americans doing over there in the first place? Why would Americans be on the other side of the world to fight the Russians? After the Cold War, Americans left Afghanistan in a terrible state. Destruction every where. They left the people of Afghanistan living with a nightmare. But they were free of the Russians. Today, no wonder civilians objected to be treated as 'non-human beings' by Americans. They wanted Americans out of their country. Suicide bombers are actually civilians who cannot see any other way to fight back. We call them 'terrorists' here in the West. The word 'terrorists' was invented by President Bush and the American Congress.

Instead of caring for the Iraqi people, Americans have killed, starved, maimed, tortured thousands of Iraqi people, destroying their infrastructure, including their water and health facilities. In the name of democracy they have created a corporate tyranny which has essentially stolen Iraq out from under the Iraqi people. They have committed war crimes against Iraqi people in prisons and have made freedom of movement and speech almost impossible. This was done by the US government, by Americans. The people of the US are responsible and must hold their government accountable.

Suicide bombers may as well be Canadian civilians defending Canada on Canadian soil against Americans invading Canada. "Terrorists' can actually be anyone in any place on the planet. They may even be Canadians not wanting WW III. WW III is going on right now in the Middle East region, at least its beginning.

Other than America, who else wants the oil and gas of the Middle East?

India, Russia, Europe Union nations, and China! They want the oil and gas of the Middle East very badly. How else could they become the biggest growing economies of the world? Without the oil and gas they have no energy and no plastic base products. That means they cannot manufacture anything. Nothing! More than half of the world population out of a job. Starving and dying! No medicinal products because you need a plastic container to hold them. Hospitals have no plastic tubes to feed you with whatever fluids your body needs. All civilizations on the planet would come to a halt without the oil and gas. Yet it is the oil and gas that is creating global warming and forcing the climate to change around the globe. This of course shows that our own civilization is base on oil and gas, and on the base products we can get from the oil and gas, manly plastics. Our civilization is, therefore, not based on principles and values as it would fall completely without oil and gas.

As far as India, Russia, Europe, and China are concerned, there is an absolute need to obtain the oil and gas of the Middle East to survive. No other ways! So now that we have understood the problem so far, what are Americans truly doing in the Middle East? Are they in the Middle East because of their dislike of Saddam Hussain? Not likely! Saddam Hussain was never important, just an excuse for the invasion. But then they never had a reason to invade Vietnam. So what is different today? The Al Qua'ida 'terrorists' threatening their way of life? We know the 'terrorist' and suicide bombers are often civilians who have got so disgusted of being invaded, their homes destroyed, and their relatives killed, that the only way to fight back was by being suicide bombers. They are soldiers in their own way defending their country from the invaders and thieves who just want to steal their resources.

So obviously Americans are in the Middle East to steal the oil and gas. Their thinking is simple: better us having the oil and gas then them, 'them' being the Iragis, or any Muslims or Arabs for that matters. But the people from the Middle East are not so stupid. They know India, Russia, European nations and China are willing to pay for their resources. So now what situation do we have here? We have Americans who want to steal the oil and gas and treat the people of the Middle East like dirt, "non human beings', and we have the people from India, Russia, European nations and China willing to pay the price and to agree that the people from the Middle East have human rights. They are 'persons' just like we are.

What we have here are the ingredients needed for World War III.

Simple as that! Nothing less!

Now our Government has changed Canada stands in the world from a peace-keeping mission to that of a war-type action as we are seeing in Afghanistan. First of all, being and showing that we are 'the very good friends of the US' was not a good thing to do. I am a Canadian, and I am not a very good friend of the Americans. I totally disagree with the invasion of the Middle East. And I dont want Canada to be thrown into a situation that has all the ingredients of WW III at the end of the tunnel. We dont actually need to steal the oil and gas. Being with the Americans will imply we are just as much thieves and invaders as they are. Not a good scenario!

What is Canada doing in Afghanistan?

Up until now Canada was on a peace-keeping mission but this was changed to a war-like stand. It looks like we want to show Americans we can be as they are: big guys with big guns, and ready to kill. Why? What are we really doing in Afghanistan? Why are we in Afghanistan when right here in Canada we need all the help we can get? We sure dont need to steal the oil and gas. Even if we had no oil and gas reserves, no resources, I would not agree of stealing anything. So why are we, Canadians, in Afghanistan? Afghans want all foreigners out of Afghanistan so what will it take to understand what they are telling us?

In order to help their political parties win the next elections, the United States and Canada have obtained surveys conducted in Iraq and in Afghanistan. They asked questions to villagers such as

"Do you like the military from Canada and the US?"

If I was one of the villagers I would say:

"YES! I love the military. The military should stay much longer. There is one or two more bridges to destroy, more oil and gas to steal, more children, women and men to kill. Please stay!"

Gosh! What else can anyone say when you have tanks and bombers over your head, and people being shot at everyday. The NATO invaders have practically destroyed everything.

The White House and the Government of Canada are going to use their surveys to benefit their invasion of Afghanistan and the Middle East. How strange! I thought we were civilized.

The current war and occupation of Iraq were undertaken in disregard of the most fundamental principles of Global Law and with obvious contempt for truth, posterity, and the morality which should guide all human actions. The result has been the occupation and colonization of Iraq and the destruction of its economy and increased violence and insecurity for the overwhelming majority of the Iraqi population. The world cannot sit by passively and watch the continued deterioration of the future of our planet.

President Bush has been elected for a second term as President of the worst polluters on the planet, and of a predator nation. During his campaign he has used religion, his religion, and its membership or supporters, to elect him. Ever since 9/11 Global Community has fought his policies at home and abroad, and how his daily lies and brain-washing exercises which have changed the American people to follow his lead. The use of the military has been abused to the detriment of Global rights.

Military intervention in the affairs of other nations is wrong.

There are other ways, there are peaceful ways, ways that are not based on profit-making and the gain of power for itself. Global Community and its membership are conscientious objectors, "nonresistants". That word comes from Jesus, opposing the use of violence:

"Ye have heard that it hath been said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also."

We, Global Citizens, therefore affirm the following conclusions and recommendations:

1.     That the US and its coalition partners immediately cease all violations of the civil, political and human rights of the people of Iraq;

2.     That the military occupation of Iraq be immediately ended;

3.     That all parties guilty of war crimes against the Iraqi people be brought to justice under Global Law; the Earth Court of Justice will prosecute the offenders;

4.     That reparations be paid by all responsible parties to the people of Iraq for the damages caused by both the war and the occupation; the amount to be paid should be no less than 8 trillion US dollars coming from the governments involved, and not from the resources of Iraq;

5.     That we work to strengthen the mobilization of the global antiwar movement;

6.     That the occupation of Palestine, Afghanistan and all other colonized areas is illegal and should be brought to an end immediately;

7.     That our military be coming back home as this is the place it is needed most to prepare for Canada's future;

8.     That Canada's military be used for peace-keeping mission and not war-like stand;

9.     That our military be used for the protection of the global-life support systems.

10.     That tax money not be used on the military, instead, tax money be used to prepare for the future: research and development on new ways to replace oil and gas, and plastics; alternative energy technologies be used now; the development of new technologies and conservation strategies is essential both to reduce pollution and to make the most of North America's resource strengths.

11.     That our commitment to the Kyoto Protocol be made a real commitment, with real tangible, meaningful actions. Status quo is not an option! It was never an option. Those who dont do anything about the global warming of the planet are criminals. Those who dont help protecting the global life-support systems are criminals of the worst kind, they are 'terrorists' threatening all life on the planet.

War is not sustainable. It never was. The military option, war, is against global sustainability and global peace in a big way. The worst environmental degradation happens in wars. Farm products in fields and livestock are abandoned, there is no more control on toxic wastes, and water, air, and land are polluted. People are displaced and feel no longer responsible for the quality of life in their communities. Historically, the industrialized nations have caused the most damage to the environment, with their careless technology and policies. Emissions from factories and vehicles have caused ozone depletion, acid rain, and dangerous greenhouse gases have forced the global warming of the planet and the climate to change dangerously, the worst threat to humanity and all life. Leaders of the wealthier nations must be willing to accept responsibility for past mistakes and to help pay the financial burden for environmental protection of the developing nations. This is the most damaging conflict of interests between the rich industrialized countries and those that are poor and struggling just for existence. Global Community helps wealthy and poorer nations reach a better understanding of each other's needs. All aspects are interrelated: global peace, global sustainability, Global rights and the environment. The poor is more concerned with ending starvation, finding a proper shelter and employment, and helping their children to survive. Environmental issues become meaningless to the poor. In reality, all concerns are interrelated. As soon as the environment is destroyed beyond repair, human suffering is next. Ecology has no boundaries. All nations suffer the effects of air pollution, global warming, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, acid rain, ozone depletion, silting of streams, and countless of other environmental problems. This was the reason for developing the Scale of Global Rights.

Now, a short while ago, the Government of Canada has followed into the same steps of this culture of violence that orginated from the USA and the U.N., and that was accomplished without asking Canadians permission, not even a public debate on the issue. Our democracy has been demoted, devalued to that of a dictatorship. And yet our government wants to teach to the people of Afghanistan the benefits of democracy. Another Busk-like lie to the world but this time by ricochet to the Canadian people.

During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Israel were the countries that sold arms to the people of the Middle East and to Afghanistan. They have shown no ethical and moral values in the activities of their trade. They have made trade a despicable act of dealing with one another between human beings and between nations. No laws! No regulations! No ethics! No moral responsibility and accountability! Everyone has the "freedom" of destroying the global life-support systems! Everyone has the "freedom" of human rights abuses! Now pollution, diseases, terrorism, poverty, social and economic injustice have no boundaries.

Global Community requires that those six nations to provide massive financial aid to the amount of eight trillion US dollars to the countries of the Middle East and to Afghanistan to help them overcome the ravages of war they have brought to them by the selling of war product and equipment. The money has to come directly from the six nations listed here and not from stealing the oil and gas resources of the Middle East. The financial aid will be administered by Earth Government . The first priority of Global Community will be to build sustainable communities in all of the Muslim nations of the Middle East, including Afghanistan.

Several times in the past Global Community has requested of the United Nations to restructure and reform its organization to be in touch with the problems humanity is facing in this millennium. They have never replied. Four of the five UN Permanent Members, the United States, Great Britain, France, and Russia, are those countries that, not only control the UN, but they are the same countries that have brought disgrace to humanity by their selfish, immoral, unethical, incoherent, inconsistent, dishonnest, erratic, and mostly aimed at making money behavior in the Middle East and towards Afghanistan. They have given to trade a bad name. Because of them free trade has become a danger to the extinction of life on Earth. They even got China, the fifth Permanent Member of the UN, to vote YES to invade Afghanistan (without that vote the UN could not have approved), in exchange of China got its membership into the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Global Community will do everything possible to give trade the proper guidance for humanity. Trade will become a global co-operation between all nations. The kind of behaviour that happened in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world will not be allowed again. That is Earth Government ’s commitment to Global Community to make government and global citizens responsible and accountable. This commitment was defined in sections 11 to 14 of the Global Citizens Rights, Responsibility and Accountability Act.

Governance of the Earth will make the rule of arbitrary power--economic (WTO, FTAA, EU), political (UN), or military (U.S.A. and NATO)-- subjected to the rule of Global Law within the global civil society, the human family. Justice is for everyone and is everywhere, a universal constant. Earth governance does not imply a lost of state sovereignty and territorial integrity. A nation government can exists within the framework of an effective Global Community Earth Government protecting common global values and humanity heritage. Earth governance gives a new meaning to the notions of territoriality, and non-intervention in a state way of life, and it is about protecting the cultural heritage of a state. Diversity of cultural and ethnic groups is an important aspect of Earth governance. Earth governance is a balance between the rights of states with rights of people, and the interests of nations with the interests of the the Global Community, the human family, the global civil society. Earth governance is about the rights of states to self-determination in the global context of Global Community rather than the traditional context of a world of separate states. Although Global Community ensures state governments that it will obey the principle of non-intervention in domestic affairs, it will also stand for the rights and interests of the people within individual states in which the security of people is extensively endangered. A global consensus to that effect will be agreed upon by all Member Nations.

The U.N. and all its related organizations have failed humanity and all life on Earth on many levels:

1.    the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should be replaced by the Scale of Global Rights;
2.    corruption, mismanagement at the highest levels, and bad global governance;
3.    promotion of the military option, war;
4.    allowing the genocides of several peoples;
5.    the business of deceiving, making believe, controlling without a democratic mandate from Global Community ;
6.    the U.N. is operating using precepts dating back 2000 years and developed by the Roman Empire; those precepts best suit the invasion of nations and the destruction of the global life-support systems and the Earth environment;
7.    the absence of proper governance and justice at the U.N.; and
8.    the use of trickery to deceive the world and subdue nations.

No one can own Mount Everest in the Himalayas just by climbing to the top

Mount Everest is the highest mountain on Earth, as measured by the height of its summit above sea level. The mountain, which is part of the Himalaya range, is located on the border between Nepal and Tibet, China. As of the end of the 2006 climbing season, there have been 3,050 ascents to the summit, by 2,062 individuals, and 203 people have died on the mountain. There have been more than 630 further ascents in 2007. The conditions on the mountain are so difficult that most of the corpses have been left where they fell; some of them are easily visible from the standard climbing routes. Climbers are a significant source of tourist revenue for Nepal; they range from experienced mountaineers to relative novices who count on their paid guides to get them to the top. The Nepalese government also requires a permit from all prospective climbers; this carries a heavy fee, often more than $25,000 (USD) per person.

How does this relate to Canada's sovereighty in the North?

The question should be how does this relate to ownership of the Earth?

Does climbing Mount Everest gives ownership of the mountain?

How does this relate to Canada's sovereighty in the North?

The question should be how does this relate to ownership of the Earth?

Does putting a flag on the Moon gives you ownership of the Moon?

Does putting a flag on Mars gives you ownership of the planet?

Does discovering the Americas by explorers gave them ownership of the Americas?

Does Canada own the Northwest Passage or Nunavut?

In 1933, the Permanent Court of International Justice declared the legal status of Greenland in favour of Denmark. The status of Hans Island was not addressed. However, decades later, Denmark would claim that geological evidence pointed to Hans Island being part of Greenland, and that it belongs to Denmark by extension of the Court's ruling.

Does Denmark truly owns Greenland? Just because you say you do? Just because the Permanent Court of International Justice say you do? What if the Court was wrong or corrupted?

Canada says it owns the Northwest Passage and Nunavut but how is that possible? Just because Canada says it does? Or because the United Nations say it does? What if the UN is corrupted? or wrong?

Obviously we know the answers to all thes questions. You dont own it. You never did and never will.

Only Global Community can rightfully claim ownership.

All the climbing techniques in the world to get to the top of Mount Everest, all the hard work, all the sweat and pain endured, and more, much more, to finally put a flag on top of the mountain. Amazing human achievement! We can really be proud of a team that did it.

But you dont own the mountain.

Just like the first European explorers who discovered America, they arrived and conquered. Natives did not have a chance. Natives said America was their home. But no longer! The explorers said it is now ours. Most Natives were shot in the USA. More survived in Canada! Explorers were not doing this hard work just for the pleasure of finding something new. Their countries sent them and pay for their expenses. Explorers were expected to find something tangible that could make their countries proud and rich.

Today we have a situation in the Middle East whereby the USA has been invading the area ever since 1947 when it has coerced the United Nations to create the State of Israel, its Trojan Horse for the invasion. Israel and the USA together have been at war with the people of the Middle East and of surrounding nations ever since.

Truly, we are on the threshold of a global revolution, and we need to proceed with the non-violent approach. We need to build an economic democracy based firmly on the basic principle that the Earth belongs equally to everyone as a birthright. The Earth is for all people to labor and live on and should never be the possession of any individual, corporation, or uncaring government, any more than the air or water, or any other Earth natural resources. An individual, or a business should have no more than is needed for a healthy living.

The impacts of our democracy are destroying the Earth global life-support systems. A few people have control over so much of the Earth. To live in a world at peace and have conditions of basic justice and fairness in human interactions, our democratic values must based in the principle of equal rights to the Earth.

Territorial conflict has for millennium been the basis of war and mass killing of others. Throughout the ages wars been fought over land, and other Earth natural resources. We have seen oil conflictsin the Persian Gulf, and the Caspian Sea Basin. We have seen water conflicts in the Nile Basin, the Jordan, and Indus River Basins. We have seen wars being fought over minerals and timber in Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Congo, New Guinea, and Borneo. We have seen conflicts over valuable gems, minerals and timber in Brazil, Angola, Cambodia, Columbia, Congo, Liberia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The view from space shows us a global landscape in which competition over resources is the governing principle behind the use of military power. Truly, resources have become the new political boundaries.

Each day taxpayers hand over astronomical amounts of money to build weapons of mass destruction, fuel dangerous and polluting technologies, and subsidize giant corporations which concentrate the wealth and power of the world in the hands of an elite few.

There is a way to share the Earth? The Global Economic Model proposed by Global Community is truly the best response to the world.

Kings and Princes of Saudi Arabia

Perhaps we could reflect on how things are done in the Middle East, say for example Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia is a monarchy based on Islam. The government is headed by the King, who is also the commander in chief of the military.

The King appoints a Crown Prince to help him with his duties. The Crown Prince is second in line to the throne.

The King governs with the help of the Council of Ministers, also called the Cabinet. There are 22 government ministries that are part of the Cabinet. Each ministry specializes in a different part of the government, such as foreign affairs, education and finance.

The King is also advised by a legislative body called the Consultative Council (Majlis Al-Shura). The Council proposes new laws and amends existing ones. It consists of 150 members who are appointed by the King for four-year terms that can be renewed.

The country is divided into 13 provinces, with a governor and deputy governor in each one. Each province has its own council that advises the governor and deals with the development of the province.

Because Saudi Arabia is an Islamic state, its judicial system is based on Islamic law (Shari’ah). The King is at the top of the legal system. He acts as the final court of appeal and can issue pardons. There are also courts in the Kingdom. The largest are the Shari’ah Courts, which hear most cases in the Saudi legal system.

Saudi Arabia is a monarchy based on Islam. The government is headed by the King, who is also the commander in chief of the military.

The King appoints a Crown Prince to help him with his duties. The Crown Prince is second in line to the throne.

The King governs with the help of the Council of Ministers, also called the Cabinet. There are 22 government ministries that are part of the Cabinet. Each ministry specializes in a different part of the government, such as foreign affairs, education and finance.

The King is also advised by a legislative body called the Consultative Council (Majlis Al-Shura). The Council proposes new laws and amends existing ones. It consists of 150 members who are appointed by the King for four-year terms that can be renewed.

The country is divided into 13 provinces, with a governor and deputy governor in each one. Each province has its own council that advises the governor and deals with the development of the province.

Because Saudi Arabia is an Islamic state, its judicial system is based on Islamic law (Shari’ah). The King is at the top of the legal system. He acts as the final court of appeal and can issue pardons. There are also courts in the Kingdom. The largest are the Shari’ah Courts, which hear most cases in the Saudi legal system.

Since the beginning of the first Saudi state in the 18th century through the founding of the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by the late King Abdulaziz bin Abdelrahman Al-Saud on September 23, 1932, Shari'ah (Islamic law) has been the pillar and source of Saudi Arabia's basic system of government. It identifies the nature of the state and its goals and responsibilities, as well as the relationship between the government and its citizens.

Recognizing that his young nation would need to adapt to the changing times in order to thrive and prosper, King Abdulaziz built the foundation for a constitutional regime, thus establishing a modern government where once tribal rulers had reigned.

A royal decree in 1953 by his son King Saud established Saudi Arabia's Council of Ministers. During the 1950s and 1960s, twenty government ministries were founded. The Council of Ministers, in conjunction with the King, formed the executive and legislative branches of the government.

This was the first step taken towards formalizing the long-established Islamic system of popular consultation, which has always been practiced by Saudi rulers. In the Majlis, weekly meetings that are open to all, members of the general public can approach the King and leaders at the local, provincial and national levels to discuss issues and raise grievances.

Beginning in the early 1970s, Saudi Arabia launched highly successful five-year development plans to set up a modern physical, social and human infrastructure. The rapid modernization of Saudi Arabia led to a re-evaluation of the country's political and administrative system.

By the 1990s, just as had his father before him, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd bin Abdulaziz felt the need to revitalize the existing political system. The primary goal was to streamline the system to deal with the requirements of the nation on the verge of the 21st century. Taking into consideration the Kingdom's role in the Islamic world as well as its traditions and social fabric, the changes were made in total adherence to the Islamic religion.

In 1992, King Fahd introduced a new Basic Law for the System of Government, and regulations for the Provincial System and Majlis Al-Shura (Consultative Council). The following year, he announced bylaws for the Council of Ministers System. In October 2003, the cabinet approved procedures for the election of half of the members of the municipal councils, as a start towards greater participation of the citizens in the governing of their country.

10/17/2007
Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz has highlighted the importance of the Kingdom’s recent judicial reforms and stressed that Islam guarantees justice for all people.

The Crown Prince made the remarks while opening an international conference on engineering arbitration organized by the Saudi Council of Engineers in Al-Khobar yesterday.

He pointed out that Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz’s allocation of $1.87 billion [SR 7 billion] to upgrade judicial facilities and train judges shows how important the sector is to the Saudi government.

The new Judiciary and Court of Grievances Laws provide for the establishment of a Supreme Court and the formation of special commercial, labor and administrative courts. In the new system, the Court of Grievances will operate as an independent body and will report directly to the King. The new laws were announced in a royal decree October 2.

Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz issued a royal decree October 8 detailing rules for implementing the Kingdom’s new succession law.

The law, which was announced in October 2006, formalizes the royal succession and aims to ensure a smooth transfer of power. Previously, the King had the sole right to select the Crown Prince. Under the new system, the King will nominate a Crown Prince, and the Allegiance Commission will vote on the candidate.

The new bylaw outlines who can become a member of the Allegiance Commission, which chooses future kings and crown princes. It also stipulates what should be done if a member of the Commission dies and how the crown prince should be selected.

As per the succession law, the Commission consists of the sons of King Abdulaziz Al-Saud, the founder of the modern Kingdom. According to the new bylaw, if a son is deceased, incapacitated or disinterested in serving on the Commission, then the membership passes to one of his sons. The potential member must be at least 22 years old and be a man of good reputation.

The bylaw stipulates that members of the Commission will serve fixed four-year terms that can only be renewed with the agreement the other Commission members and approval of the King.

If a member of the Commission fails to perform his duties, then a panel of three fellow members will investigate the violation and submit a report to the Commission. In the event that two-thirds of the members decide that the violation merits dismissal, then the matter will be submitted to the King.

Upon the death of the King, the Allegiance Committee will meet immediately to name the Crown Prince as King. The new King then has 10 days to submit a letter to the chairman of the Allegiance Commission naming his choice for Crown Prince or asking the Commission to nominate someone to the office. The Commission then has 10 days from receipt of the King’s letter to choose a nominee.

Referring to the appointment of a medical panel to report on the health of the King, Crown Prince or Commission member, the new bylaw states that the panel’s meetings would be secret. Medical reports are to be prepared at the Commission’s venue and signed by all members of the medical panel.

The Secretary-General of the Allegiance Commission will be responsible for all of its financial and administrative affairs. The Secretary-General will hold the rank of Minister, while his deputy will hold the rank of Excellent.

10/16/2007
Supreme Council of Petroleum and Mineral Affairs renewed

Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz issued a royal order today renewing the Supreme Council of Petroleum and Mineral Affairs (SCPM) for four years, effective October 26, 2007.

The newly re-formed SCPM will be chaired by King Abdullah, with Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz serving as deputy president. Minister of State Dr. Muttlab Al-Nafissa will serve as member and secretary general. Other members include Minister of Foreign Affairs Prince Saud Al-Faisal, Minister of Labor Ghazi Al-Qusaibi, Minister of Commerce and Industry Hashim Yamani, Minister of Petroleum Ali Al-Naimi, Minister of Finance Ibrahim Al-Assaf, Minister of Economy and Planning Khalid Al-Qusaibi, President of the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology Dr. Muhammad Al-Sowayel, and Saudi Aramco President and CEO Abdullah Juma’ah.

Established in 2000, the SCPM is responsible for policymaking on the exploitation of petroleum, gas and other hydrocarbon materials.

Who owns the Earth? Movement for taxation of all Earth natural resources

In today's affairs a very powerful few are in possession of the land and the Earth's resources. These few people operate practically without taxation. Is that what we want as a global democracy? Who should own the Earth?

Soveveignty is the status of a person or group of persons having supreme and independent political authority. The concept of sovereignty is related to the concept of power: power over a territory, land and water, oil and minerals, as well as life on Earth. The United Nations (UN) cannot have normal attributes of sovereignty, which has been defined around a territory and population.

Global Community has in fact been defined around a given territory, that territory being the planet as a whole, as well as a specific population, which is Global Community. The issue here is not that of populations and boundary lines, but of the demarcation of power and control over the Earth that is the foremost formal attribute of sovereignty.

To speak of enforceable global law is to speak of world power. Global Parliament has the power to make the laws of the land and to make the rules for the territory of the Earth. Global Law has been and continue to be researched and developed for this purpose.

Today our democracy is not based on equal rights to the Earth and its natural resources. Conservation, restoration, and protection of the Earth resources is about asking ourselves the question of "Who owns the Earth?" The large gap between rich and poor is conected to ownership and control of the planet's land and of all other Earth natural resources. This causes a fundamental threat to democracy. What has become of democracy? What has become " we the people? "

We need to take a giant step forward to a new form of democracy. We, Global Community, must now direct the wealth of the world towards the building of local-to-global economic democracies in order to meet the needs for food, shelter, universal healthcare, education, and employment for all.

Global Community has proposed a new democratic mandate recognizing that the land, the air, oil and natural gas, minerals, all other natural resources rightly belong to Global Community. The Earth is our birthright and our common heritage. What we make from our mental and physical labor can rightfully be held as individual property but the profit of the Earth should be shared by all life. The unjust and inequitable ownership of the land and of all other natural resources has caused the great majority of local-to-global conflicts and wars.

The Global Economic Model proposed by Global Community is truly the best response to the world.

Let us remind everyone the definition that has been guiding us throughout the previous dialogues:

" Global Community is defined as being all that exits or occurs at any location at any time between the Ozone layer above and the core of the planet below."

This is the fundamental definition of the expression "Global Community". This definition includes all people, all life on Earth. It also implicitly says that no-one in particular owns the Earth but we all own it together. Not just us people, but all life on Earth owns it. The beginning of life stretches as far back as 4 billion years, and so Life claims its birthright of ownership of Earth, and so does the Soul of all Life, the Soul of Humanity. Throughout this paper the land ownership of the Earth means ownership of the land and of all other Earth natural resources.

"A global community" is not about a piece of land you acquired by force or otherwise. One could think of a typical community that does not have to be bounded by a geographical or political border. It can be people living in many different locations all over the world. Global Community is thus more fluid and dynamic. We need to let go the archaic ways of seeing a community as the street where we live and contained by a border. Many conflicts and wars will be avoided by seeing ourselves as people with a heart, a mind and a Soul, and as part of a community with the same.

The old concept of a community being the street where we live in and surrounded by a definite geographical and political boundary has originated during the Roman Empire period. An entire new system of values was then created to make things work for the Roman Empire. Humanity has lived with this concept over two thousand years. Peoples from all over the world are ready to kill anyone challenging their border. They say that this is their land, their property, their 'things'. This archaic concept is endangering humanity and its survival. The Roman Empire has gone but its culture is still affecting us today. We need to let go the old way of thinking. We need to learn of the new concept, and how it can make things work in the world.

A typical community may be what a group of people, together, wants it to be. It can be a group of people sharing with the same values. It can be a group of people with the same cultural background, or the same religious background. Or they can be people with totally different backgrounds and beliefs. The people making a global community may be living in many different locations on the planet. With today's communications it is easy to group people in this fashion. It can be a village, or two villages together where people have decided to unite as one community. The two villages may be found in different parts of the world. It can be a town, a city, or a nation. It can be two or more nations together.

Following this thinking we see land ownership is no longer a problem. The Earth and all its natural resources belong to all the "global communities" contained therein. A village, or a city is "a global community" and owns the land around its boundaries. Along with Global Community, it has ownership of all natural resources within its boundaries. We will see in the Preview how this new system can work.

As mentioned above, land here, by definition, covers all naturally occurring resources like surface land, the air, minerals deposits (gold, oil and gas etc), water, electromagnetic spectrum, the trees, fish in the seas and rivers. It is unjust to treat land as private property. Land is not a product of labor. Everyone should therefore be given equal access to such natural resources.

On the global level the Law of the Seas Covenant is an example of a ground rent basis for public needs as it has affirmed that ocean resources are the common heritage of all and a proper source of funding for global institutions. Water belongs to the Earth and all species and is sacred to life therefore, the world’s water must be conserved, reclaimed and protected for all future generations and its natural patterns respected.

Water is a fundamental human right and a public trust to be guarded by all levels of government; therefore, it should not be commodified, privatized or traded for commercial purposes. These rights must be enshrined at all levels of government. In particular, an international treaty must ensure these principles are noncontrovertable.

Water is best protected by local communities and citizens, who must be respected as equal partners with governments in the protection and regulation of water. Peoples of the Earth are the only vehicle to promote democracy and save water.

Similarly, all the Earth natural resources belong to Global Community to be used, developed and conserved for the maximum benefit of the people and of all life.

Global Community should set up expert groups and begin the necessary intergovernmental negotiations towards establishing alternative revenue sources, which could include fees for the commercial use of the oceans, fees for airplane use of the skies, fees for use of the electromagnetic spectrum, fees levied on foreign exchange transactions, and a tax on carbon content of fuels.

This thinking should give us a fresh start for a better future and bring some light to understanding previous claims of the many different groups such as:

• Native and aboriginal people claiming that their ancestors owned the land so now they do



• God gave it to us so the land is ours



• Property ownership system of the Roman Empire to today, our social-economic system of land owership



• The military power of this world forcing ownership of land and of all other Earth natural resources against the will of everyone else

None of the above groups can claim ownership of the land and other Earth natural resources. They never did own the land and of all other Earth natural resources. And they never will.

Only Global Community can rightfully claim ownership of the Earth.

However, we have reached the deplorable circumstance where in large measure a very powerful few are in possession of the Earth's resources, the land and all its riches, and all the franchises and other privileges that yield a return. These monopolistic positions are kept by a handful of men who are maintained virtually without taxation.

Whoever owns the land and all other natural resources exerts power over those who are landless and no resources. Global Community proposes to extend democratic principles to include the ownership and control of the Earth. The Global Economic Model was created for all the people on the planet. The model makes sure that the rights of all people and the rights of the planet are one and the same.

The Global Economic Model stipulates as well that we, as human beings, are trustees and caretakers of all other life forms on Earth.

The Global Economic Model is global, as people are freed to move beyond borders and boundaries and claim the whole Earth as their birthplace.

How the Earth should be owned is the major economic question of this time. The world should be owned not just by the people living in it but by all life on Earth and the Soul of Life, the Soul of Humanity.

Unless a reformed or empowered Global Parliament is leading firmly upon the principle of equal rights for Global Community, then the planet will be controlled by a handful of vested interests.

Land here, by definition, covers all naturally occurring resources like surface land, minerals deposits (gold, oil etc), water, electromagnetic spectrum, the trees, fish in the seas and rivers. It is unjust to treat land as private property. Land is not a product of labor. Everyone should therefore be given equal access to natural resources. The Global Economic Model proposes to make private property the product of labor. Common property is all what Nature offers. The Global Economic Model policy removes taxes from wages and increases taxes and user fees on common property.

The model eliminates subsidies that are environmentally or socially harmful, and inequitable.

The ownership of natural resources ultimately determines the social, the political and consequently the mental and physical condition of a people. Attaining an ethic of wise and careful stewardship of the Earth is likewise inseparable from the task of securing the well-being of individuals. The health of a person and the health of the Earth are interrelated.

The Earth is our birthright and our common heritage. What we make from our mental and physical labor can rightfully be held as individual property but the profit of the Earth should be shared by all life. and for all.The unjust and inequitable ownership and control of vast amounts of the land and of other natural resources has caused many global conflicts and wars.

Every national government must show a commitment to making available enough land in the context of sustainable land-use policies. This policy applies as well to the Inuit people, and to all Native communities in Canada. Governments at all levels, including all Native communities, should remove all possible obstacles that may hamper equitable access to land and ensure that equal rights of women and men related to land and property are protected under the law. When there are no Canadians wanting the land then Global Community will have people from other countries in need of land to settle with their families.



Truly, we are on the threshold of a global revolution, and we need to proceed with the non-violent approach. We need to build an economic democracy based firmly on the basic principle that the Earth belongs equally to everyone as a birthright. The Earth is for all people to labor and live on and should never be the possession of any individual, corporation, or uncaring government, any more than the air or water, or any other Earth natural resources. An individual, or a business should have no more than is needed for a healthy living.

The impacts of our democracy are destroying the Earth global life-support systems. A few people have control over so much of the Earth. To live in a world at peace and have conditions of basic justice and fairness in human interactions, our democratic values must based in the principle of equal rights to the Earth.

Territorial conflict has for millennium been the basis of war and mass killing of others. Throughout the ages wars been fought over land, and other Earth natural resources. We have seen oil conflictsin the Persian Gulf, and the Caspian Sea Basin. We have seen water conflicts in the Nile Basin, the Jordan, and Indus River Basins. We have seen wars being fought over minerals and timber in Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Congo, New Guinea, and Borneo. We have seen conflicts over valuable gems, minerals and timber in Brazil, Angola, Cambodia, Columbia, Congo, Liberia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The view from space shows us a global landscape in which competition over resources is the governing principle behind the use of military power. Truly, resources have become the new political boundaries.

Each day taxpayers hand over astronomical amounts of money to build weapons of mass destruction, fuel dangerous and polluting technologies, and subsidize giant corporations which concentrate the wealth and power of the world in the hands of an elite few.

There is a way to share the Earth? The Global Economic Model proposed by Global Community is truly the best response to the world.

A global economic model is based on respect and value all life on Earth. It recognizes that we as human beings are trustees and caretakers of the many life forms that dwell here with us. A global economic model extends the democratic mandate to solve the land problem by affirming the equal right of all people to the Earth. It will have a balanced and just relationship of citizenry to government with enlightened public finance policy based on land and land rent for the people. Money will be issued and circulated as a service for the people as a whole rather than used as a mechanism for the exploitation of the many by the few.

A global economic model is global, as people are freed to move beyond borders and boundaries and claim the whole Earth as their birthplace. It is highly decentralized as well, with people living and producing for their basic human needs within the constraints and parameters of local ecological systems. A global economic model is about a world that works for everyone, with plenty of time to expand our minds and elevate our spirits.

How the Earth should be owned is the major economic question of this time. The world should be owned by the people living in it. The Earth itself is the bottom line. The land is the source of all life and wealth. To survive, we must have somewhere to stand and to rest. But this absolute necessity for our very existence is nowhere guaranteed in our constitutional laws. Our Bill of Rights did not proclaim the human right to the Earth.

We must grasp the injustice at the core of our present economic system. We need to understand how far we have strayed from reality and how we have been led into illusionary games of finance. Our treatment of the Earth as a market commodity, just like a car or television, is the basic flaw in our economic ground rules.

When land became a 'commodity' and lost its status as provider and sustainer of life, Western civilization began its history of subjugation and exploitation of the Earth and Earth based cultures.

A global economic model can achieve fairness by giving the equal right of all people to the land and to all other natural resources, and the right of the individual to the products of labor.

A condition of "ownership" of any particular landsite or natural resource is payment of the fee back to the community as a whole. This fee is the proper source of public finance for the needs of the community.

On the global level the Law of the Seas Covenant is an example of a fee collected basis for public needs as it means that ocean resources are the common heritage of all and a proper source of funding for global institutions.

In order to democratize land rights, we can make land available to individuals and groups who wish to live in ecologically sustainable villages and farms. Community land trusts can hold title to such lands. The buildings and improvements can be privately owned. This process is a strong incentive for the creation of employment.

The global economic model also allows for an increase of taxes and fees on natural resources:

Emissions into air, water, or soil
Land sites according to land value
Lands used for timber, grazing, mining
Ocean and freshwater resources
Electromagnetic or radio-frequency spectrum
Satellite orbital zones
Oil and minerals
Hydropower

Most issues and aspects of global governance and Earth management are already being applied by Global Community. But there is no agency powerful enough to protect life on Earth from those who care not about it. At best what we have is the Global Justice Movement for all life which has found a process for the establishment of justice amongst us all. What we have not done is the actual governing and managing of the planet as per the Global Constitution and Global Law. And that is our first priority now.

The planet and all its resources of land, water, forests, minerals, the atmosphere, electro-magnetic frequencies, and even satellite orbits belong to Global Community. The Global Economic Model makes sure that the profits of the Earth will benefit the people and all life, and secure an age of peace and fairness for all.

Properly managed small farms along with ecological villages can produce a diverse range of food, fiber, livestock, and energy products for local markets. Bio methods of farming depending on renewable energy sources can yield both social and environmental stability. Tax policies that remove taxes on labor and productive capital will be the sustainable pillar that makes the global economic model works for all.

This Global Movement for land value taxation and natural resource rent for revenue can provide the basis for worldwide economic democracy. Freedom to live or work in any part of the globe would also further equality of entitlement to the planet, and provide a basis for the resolution of resource wars and territorial conflicts. There would be no more private profit as unearned income from Earth natural resources. Instead, transparent and accountable resource agencies would collect resource rents and distribute those funds in public services or as direct citizen dividends. With fundamental democracy in rights to the Earth firmly established through legal means and mandates, basic needs would be secured for all and the militarized national security state and its bloated budgets could wither away.

Global Protection Agency (GPA) and the Agency of Global Police (AGP).

Building global communities require understanding of global problems this generation is facing. There are several major problems: conflicts and wars, no tolerance and compassion for one another, world overpopulation, human activities, as population increases the respect and value of a human life is in decline, insufficient protection and prevention for global health, scarcity of resources and drinking water, poverty, Fauna and Flora species disappearing at a fast rate, global warming and global climate change, global pollution, deforestation, permanent lost of the Earth's genetic heritage, and the destruction of the global life-support systems and the eco-systems of the planet. We need to build global communities for all life on the planet. We need to build global communities that will manage themselves with the understanding of the above problems.

Results from previous Global Dialogues have showed us that the governance of Earth through global cooperation and symbiotical relationships was the only possible option for a large population such as the Earth's population, and so, to help achieve this goal we have developed the Global Constitution and the Global Citizens Rights, Responsibility and Accountability Act to govern ourselves as member nations of Earth Govewrnment.

Building global communities requires a mean to enforce global law that protects all life on Earth.

Earth Government Agency of Global Police will train and lead a global police force, bypassing traditional peacekeeping and military bodies such as the United Nations and NATO. This is a great opportunity for globallateralism.

The Agency of Global Police (AGP) is leading a group of people in the world who participate in:

a)     peacekeeping and peacemaking mission;

b)     creating global ministries for:

1.     the policy response to the consequences of the global warming, and
2.     the development of strategies to adapt to the consequences of the unavoidable climate change.

c)     enforcing global law;

d)     saving the Earth's genetic heritage;

e)     keeping the world healthy and at peace;

f)     protecting the global life-support systems and the eco-systems of the planet;

g)     dealing with the impacts of: global poverty, lack of drinking water and food, global warming and the global climate change, threat to security, conflicts and wars, lack of good quality soil for agriculture, polluted air, water and land, overcrownded cities, more new and old diseases out of control, widespread drugs, Global rights abuses, world overpopulation, and lack of resources;

h)     broadening the traditional focus of the security of states to include both the security of people as well as that of the planet. Global security policies include:

*     every person on Earth has a right to a secure existence, and all states have an obligation to protect those rights
*     prevention of conflicts and wars; identification, anticipation, and resolving conflicts before they become armed confrontations. The Earth Court of Justice will help here.
*     military force is not a legitimate political instrument
*     weapons of mass destruction are not legitimate instruments of national defence
*     eliminate all weapons of mass destruction from all nations and have inspectors verifying progress to that effect
*     all nations should sign and ratify the conventions to eliminate nuclear, chemical and biological weapons
*     the production and trade in arms should be listed as a criminal act against humanity; this global ministry will introduce a Convention on the curtailment of the arms trade, a provision for a mandatory Arms Register and the prohibition of the financing or subsidy of arms exports by governments
*     the development of military capabilities is a potential threat to the security of people and all life on Earth; the ministry will make the demilitarization of global politics a high priority.
*     anticipating and managing crises before they escalate into armed conflicts and wars
*     maintaining the integrity of the environment and global life-support systems
*     managing the environmental, economic, social, political and military conditions that threatened the security of people and all life on the planet
*     over the past decades and even now today, all Five Permanent Members of the United Nations Security Council (mostly the United States, Russia and Britain) were responsible for selling weapons and war equipment. These three nations are required to give back to Global Community an amount of 8 trillion dollars (American) as a payment for the immense damage they have caused in the world. They have created a culture of violence throughout the world. They are nation bullies, nation predators. They are responsible for economic mismanagement, ethnic tensions, crimes, drug abuse, high unemployment, urban stress, worldwide poverty, and pressures on natural resources. Most conflicts in the world are direct legacies of cold war power politics, senseless politics. Other conflicts were caused by the end of the cold war and the collapse of old regimes. Other factors have combined to increase tension: religious, economical, political, and ethnic aspects.

Shut down the war industry.

In the past, security was thought as better accomplished through military means. Expanding the military capabilities and forming alliances with other nations were the only way to 'win'. Today wars are unlikely to produce winners. Global Community is all over the planet. Ethnic groups are everywhere. Some say there are more Italians in Montreal, Canada that there are in Italy. So we would fight our own people? Wars truly make no sense! The world is too crowded and too small nowadays! And weapons too lethal! So security cannot be achieved through the military. The only job the military should be asked to do today is to protect the global life-support systems. These systems have the highest priority on the Scale of Global Rights and are certainly more important than any of the other rights on the Scale including security. Simply because without life there is no other right possible. Without Oxygen there is no life! Without clean water there is no life! So protect life on Earth at all costs. Wars are the biggest threat to life and the ecosystem of the planet. Primordial human rights come next on the Scale of Global Rights. Without a shelter life will still exist in some places but is not possible in cold place. There are many related aspects of the global life-support systems:

*     global warming
*     Ozone layer
*     wastes of all kind including nuclear and release of radiation
*     climate change
*     species of the fauna and flora becoming extinct
*     losses of forest cover and of biological diversity
*     the capacity for photosynthesis
*     the water cycle
*     food production systems
*     genetic resources
*     chemicals produced for human use and not found in nature and, eventually, reaching the environment with impacts on Earth's waters, soils, air, and ecology

So security must be achieved by other means than wars. We might as well shelved the war industry from humanity right now and that means phasing out all nuclear, biological, chemical weapons right now. No waiting! That also means having inspectors verifying the phasing out in all nations of the world, and not just in the Middle East region and North Korea. The nature of global security has changed since the rise of Global Community. Security used to be about the protection of the state and its boundaries, people, institutions and values from an outside threat. Global Community emphasizes as a priority the prohibition of external interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states. Today the security of people within Global Community is just as important as the security of states. Citizens must be secure. Global Community is just as important as the security and life of citizens and states.

There are many threats to security other than the threats to the global life-support systems and threat caused by weapons of mass destruction and the threats to the sovereignty of a state, and they include:

*     the proliferation of conventional small arms
*     the terrorizing of civilian populations by domestic groups
*     gross violations of Global rights

Global security can only be achieved if it can be shared by all peoples and through global co-operation, based on principles as explained in the Global Constitution such as justice, human dignity, and equity for all and for the good of all. All people and states are protected by Global Community.

The Agency of Global Police provides leadership for training of other countries' citizens who would like to participate in peacekeeping and Earth security ... so that we have a ready cadre of people who are trained and equipped and organised and have communications that they can work with each other.

The overall size of the force, or who would pay for it, have not been discussed, but the idea has been raised with countries in Europe and Asia.

To act as a global policing force, as the AGP aspires to do, many foundations must be laid, especially regarding the move from wielding power derived from Global Community to legitimate global leadership. There are many required characteristics that are prerequisite for legitimate leadership:

1.     Legitimate leadership is built upon trust. Those who are led must largely believe that the leader is committed to integrity, honesty, and transparent inquiry into problems. The leader’s actions must align with his words

2.     Legitimate leadership rests upon checks and balances, which are necessary to ensure power is not corrupted.

3.     Legitimate leadership is an act of service. Those in power must show a primary interest in the good of the collective ahead of their self-interest. In this way, true leaders are mission-centered rather than self-centered.

4.     Legitimate leadership empowers others appropriately rather than concentrating power disproportionately. In other words, true leaders produce more leaders and empower them as situations demand.

5.     Legitimate leadership is visionary, carrying the torch of a possible future.

6.     Legitimate leadership is willing to lead by example, including following a foundation of ethics, performing more than one’s share of work, and making sacrifices where appropriate.

7.     Legitimate leadership is compassionately fierce when something undermines the good of the whole. In a company this might mean the CEO fires a slacking employee. In a city, the police may jail a murderer. On a global level, this might even mean arresting those breaking global law.

The defence function of a leader requires that he safeguard the good of the whole by whatever the most skillful means are to accomplish that defence.

While that is not a comprehensive catalog of leadership prerequisites, I do think those few requirements are foundational and relatively unquestionable. Without at least a solid foundation of those requirements, the AGP’s actions among nation-states will remain those of a unilateralist leader rather than a global leader. We will be, and should be, legitimated in the role of a global leader among nation-states and validated as police enforcer. Global Community offers a few recommendations for actions that would strengthen and legitimate the AGP’s role as a true global leader by gradually creating an international structure that better safeguards the whole than we can ever do now as a unilateralist leader.

The AGP recommendations:

1.     Ban military action in all parts of the world;

2.     Lead the way in creating legitimate power for Global Parliament, subjecting ourselves and multinational corporations to taxation that generates money for programs that are focused on world betterment and world problems. As a mark of our global leadership, we should commit a greater percentage of our resources to this effort than any other organization.

3.     Hold ourselves to a high standard of compliance around global treaties that aim for collective benefit and the redress of economic, environmental, military, and political problems. Our adherence should be exemplary. Or, if we truly question the merit of a global accord, we should lead the way in creating agreements that even better serve the global interest rather than simply ignoring or undermining the existing attempts.

4.     Exert strong global leadership on multinational solutions to pressing health, environmental, and other problems. We should propose innovative new solutions and show leadership in carrying them out, especially in areas such as clean energy development.

5.     Take seriously the process of coming clean by exposing corporate interests in politics, lobbying by powerful organizations, subsidies of fringe military groups, etc. When our global government officials commit to be honest and transparent, a much deeper foundation of international trust will be built.

As we enact global law, we will begin to take on a much deeper kind of global leadership, one that earns more respect than envy and more gratitude than hatred, one that can catapult the whole planet forward into a future where war is no longer thinkable between nation-states and a legitimate and beneficial global government is able to cope with global problems.

I believe that there is no greater task in the world today than for Global Community to proceed through the maturation of its leadership, emerging from a more self-interested adolescence as a global leader into a nobler adulthood. We have the potential to act as a torchbearer for a better tomorrow. Do we heed the call? I hope this message has convinced at least a few people that the question of how to proceed with that maturation is of far deeper significance than the reforming of the United Nations. I thus pray that we move with wisdom, grace, clarity, and love in the days, years, and even decades ahead.

The Earth Court of Justice has made clear that the new global law legislation has been enacted, the Global Citizens Rights, Responsibility and Accountability Act, will be enforced by the AGP. Global Law is now the law of the land on the planet. No one is excuse! Everyone is included! Those breaking Global Law will be prosecuted. For now, those committing crimes against humanity and all life on Earth will be arrested. There are Global Community Arrest Warrants against all world leaders of the Five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council.

Global Community blames the actions of the Five Permanent Members for not having put hard sanctions against the USA for having unilaterally invaded Iraq and letting Americans plundering the oil and gas resources of the Iraquis. That in itself is a crime against humanity and all life on the planet. That goes against Global Sustainability and Global Peace. Through the manipulation of the world media, it now seems OK to prepare for the invasion of Iran. That also is a crime.

It is a crime against humanity to promote the military option, war, as a solution to the world problems.

The USA have given Israel enough WMDs, including nuclear war heads, capable to destroy the entire Middle East region and no sanctions were ever enforced against Israel and the USA. They were given to Israel by the United States. Israel was made the Trojan Horse of the USA for the invasion of the Middle East and surrounding nations, including China. Back in 1947, the creation of the State of Israel was a strategic military move by the USA military aiming at the invasion of the Middle East and securing for themselves the oil and gas reserves in the region. Where was the leadership of the Un Security Council? What have you done to stop the invasion? Nothing! You have never done anything to help humanity and all life on the planet.

Certainly we ought to disarm all nations from all weapons of mass destruction.

The leadership of the United Nations has failed to enforce disarmement. It is a tragedy that such a failure is now seen as the source of other nations, such as Iran and others, wanting to defend themselves against an invasion by the USA.

And that is a crime against humanity and all life. The Earth Court of Justice has now a Global Community Arrest Warrant against world leaders of the Five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council for crimes against humanity. The following table shows their names and one kind of WMDs they possess.

The Five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council are all declared nuclear weapons states

Country leader	Warheads active/total	Year of first test
United States President George Walker Bush	40,000	1945
Russia President Vladimir Putin	10,000	1949
United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair	< 200	1952
President of the French Republic Jacques Chirac	350	1960
President of the People's Republic of China Hu Jintao	130	1964

With their nuclear war heads and other WMDs, the Five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council are holding the world and all life on Earth hostage. We are being threatened by their warheads. All life on the planet is being threatened. That makes them terrorists. The Five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council are terrorists, criminals and ought to be stopped. Global Community will disarm you, like it or not. No waiting! There has been enough wasted time during the Cold War. The AGP will come to your country and disarm you. Right now!

The North Korea crisis is just another example of the lack of proper leadership of the United Nations. Everyone saw the problem coming from the time President Bush insulted:

Kim Jong-il, the leader of Democratic People's Republic of Korea,
Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, and
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Remember the now famous 'axe of evil' expression?!

The world knew America was invading the Middle East. Why has the UN not enforced hard sanctions against the USA for its bullying tactics at the UN to get what it wants? Proper UN leadership could have avoided the situation we have today. The UN did nothing at a critical time and just watched things happening. The UN is the organization where bullying takes place by those with nuclear war heads. The world is threatened by nuclear war heads. The Five Permanent Members of the UN are allowed to bully any other nations. They are holding the world hostage with the threat of their nuclear war heads. They are all terrorist governments. There are Global Community Arrest Warrants against all Five Permanent Members leaders. They are terrorists, dangerous criminals, and must be stopped. We will disarm you, like or not! Life on Earth has no need of all you with nuclear war heads and other WMDs. If you refuse to disarm it will be because you are very much like those others you accuse of being terrorists: you are the worst terrorists on the planet.

The USA is invading the world, and the UN can do nothing to stop them. The USA was allowed to invade other nations, change their governments, and has often made lies in speeches to the UN, to the world. Remember what the US representatives told the world at the UN prior to the invasion of Iraq? Lies! All lies! And the leadership of the UN never did anything to reprimand the US representatives and implement hard sanctions for the invasion of Iraq. Ever since its creation in 1947, the USA have given Israel enough WMDs, including nuclear war heads, to destroy the entire Middle East region and no sanctions were ever enforced against Israel and the USA. Where was the UN leadership? What has the UN done to stop the invasion? Nothing! The UN has never done anything to help humanity. And that is a crime against humanity. There is now a Global Community Arrest Warrant against Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary-General. Many reasons! He is a criminal because he had the power and was able to show leadership as per the Global Constitution of the UN but never did anything to follow those principles in the Global Constitution he was supposed to be standing for. To do nothing is a crime against humanity and all life on Earth. It is pure disgrace that we now have the UN organization allowing the USA break the friendship between North Korea and China. The USA invaded the Middle East in a similar way: breaking frienships between the different communities of the Middle East, creating hate between communities. The USA is responsible and accountable for the civil war in Iraq.

In conclusion, the eventual invasion of China is the reason why the United States dont want North Korea and other Middle East nations to have nuclear weapons. What else could it be? Americans are all over the Middle East creating hate between the different communities, invading, stealing oil and gas reserves, and spreading the false belief that democracy is the best political system. Democracy got us to where we are today: the worst polluters on the planet and threatening the existence of all life. Our consumer driver political system is wrong. Our ways of life are wrong! We know it, and we still try to impose them to other Peoples. America would like the Peoples of North Korea, China and of the Middle East nations to be like us consumers, the worst polluters and on a planetary destructive path. In this way, Americans back home would not be feeling so guilty of being so bad. They would rather let others take the blame for their failure as a society.

Have you ever flown over North Korea at night? Almost no light above cities! Why? No electricity! That makes them environmentally friendly and non-polluters. What about plastics!? To have no electricity implies no consumer products made of plastics. No fridges! No freezers, which also means that they do not destroy the Ozone layer around the planet, a global life-support system to all life. Fridges and freezers use refrigerants which eventually are released to the atmosphere and destroy the Ozone layer. We could go on listing the implications of no light at night. Yet the people of North Korea live happy lives. Well! That was until Americans got into the picture. The people of North Korea are the most environmentally friendly people on the planet and Americans are jealous of that. Americans want everyone on the planet to be just like they are in America: the worst polluters on a planetary destructive path.

And guess who is next: China. Americans want the people of China to be just like they are: a consumer driven society and the worst polluters. And the invasion of China is their long term economic and military plan. If the United States can destroy North Korea, and its friendship with China, they can destroy China. North Korea is just a strategic military test to see how far and how well Americans can do invading the region without being told off. And what will be China's reaction...? If China does nothing meaningful to stop the invasion then America will continue further its progressive 'democratisation' of the world. But the United States would rather make money in the process, and that means letting rich American corporations getting richer by having the people of China working for them and so, polluting the planet even more on their behalf. Global Community has developed and implemented the 'New Way of Doing Business'. Over its long past history trade has never evolved to require from the trading partners to become legally and morally responsible and accountable for their products from beginning to end. At the end the product becomes a waste and it needs to be properly dispose of. Now trade must be given a new impetus to be in line with the global concepts of Global Community. You manufacture, produce, mine, farm or create a product, you become legally and morally responsible and accountable of your product from beginning to end (to the point where it actually becomes a waste; you are also responsible for the proper disposable of the waste). This product may be anything and everything from oil and gas, weapons, war products, to genetically engineered food products. All consumer products. All medicinal products! All pharmaceutical products! Som when America sells technology, or anything at all, to China, America becomes responsible and accountable of its trade from beginning to end. If the technology is a car, and car manufacturing, then America is responsible and accountable of the pollution coming out of it. The pollution coming out of the car manufactured in China is to be added to the USA pollution. A political border does not take away your responsibility and accountability. Selling something does not take away your responsibility and accountability. Nuclear war heads and other WMDs given to Israel is the same idea. America is responsible and accountable of its doing.

That is the idea!

First the economic and military invasion of the Middle East nations using Israel as a Trojan Horse, then China is next. The American Congress has already begun this economic and military invasion by passing legislation allowing rich corporations doing 'business' in China.

Prosecuting criminals on the basis of universal jurisdiction regardless of a territorial or nationality nexus required a solid commitment of political will from national governments and Global Community.

Global Community has now implemented a total embargo on all U.S., France, United Kingdom, China and Russia consumer products, goods and services including mass destruction chemicals, small arms, nuclear war heads, weapons of mass destruction, , war products and war equipment. The war industry throughout the world must be put to a complete halt and shelved forever from humanity. Global Community is asking all Peoples never again to buy their products and services, and never supply them with the same.

Letter to all Canadians concerning the Northwest Passage, Nunavut and Canada Sovereignty

October 22, 2007
Letter to all Canadians concerning the Northwest Passage, Nunavut and Canada Sovereignty

Dear Canadians,

The creation of Nunavut was the outcome of the largest aboriginal land claims agreement between the Canadian government and the native Inuit people. The Inuit is one of the first indigenous peoples in the Americas to achieve self-government. They have the right to participate in decisions regarding the land and water resources, and rights to harvest wildlife on their lands. In the pass, the Canadian Government took advantage of the Inuit to further its sovereignty agenda while ignoring their suggestions and demands. The importance of an equal partnership between the federal government and the Inuit regarding a future Northern Strategy should not have been underestimated. The Inuit have a very practical interest in stewardship in the North. The Canada’s Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act is a good start, but without the ability to enforce this Act at present, the likelihood of protecting Northern resources is unlikely. The Inuit community has to be actively involved with both the Earth management of the Northwest passage and Nunavut territory. How come when there is an immense area of land to settle in such as in Nunavut, no one, including Canada, the USA, and United Nations say anything at all. Complete silence!

Conservation, restoration, and management of the Earth resources is about asking ourselves the question of "Who owns the Earth?" The large gap between rich and poor is connected to ownership and control of the planet's land and of all other Earth natural resources. We, Global Community, must now direct the wealth of the world towards the building of local-to-global economic democracies in order to meet the needs for food, shelter, universal healthcare, education, and employment for all.

Global Community has proposed a democracy for the people based on the fact that land, the air, water, oil, minerals, and all other natural resources rightly belong to Global Community along with the local communities where those resources are found. The Earth is the birthright of all life. The Global Economic Model proposed by Global Community is truly the best response to the world.

To gain control of the Northwest Passage, Canada would have to show strong Earth management initiatives and not making empty promises like Brian Mulroney with his Polar 8 icebraker. We remember the purchase of the Polar 8 icebreaker to patrol Canada northern border was cancelled in 1989 by then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, head of the Conservatives. If the Conservatives want to make a difference with Canada's sovereignty it better be a real one, not a fake one. History is telling now. The Conservative PM is more preoccupied with an illegal invasion of Afghanistan than Canada's sovereignty in the North and the protection of its environment.

During his time as Prime Minister Jean Chretien and head of the Liberals, Canada has spent $51 million to map and identify the boundary of its continental shelf in the Arctic, pursuant to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Canada ratified the UNCLOS in 2003 and has 10 years from that date to determine the extent of its continental shelf. This mapping will help to determine Canada’s exact sovereign rights in terms of economic control (beyond the UNCLOS - defined 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone) and resource exploration. That money and its positive impact on Canada's sovereignty were more than what Brian Mulroney and the PM together have ever done toward protecting Canada's sovereignty.

Global Community criteria for sovereignty:

• a global community is in place
• the land and its natural resources are just enough to live a sustainable life and for a healthy living
• the community governs its owns affairs as per the Scale of Global Rights, Global Law, Global Constitution, and the protection of the environment and of the global life-support systems
• a symbiotical relationship exists between the citizens and Global Community
• a democracy based on the fact that land, the air, water, oil, minerals, and all other natural resources within the community rightly belongs to the community along with Global Community, and that the Earth is the birthright of all life
• Earth management and taxation of all Earth natural resources

Without this criteria no one can claim ownership - sovereignty - of both Nunavut and the Northwest Passage.

In Nunavut there is also a vast array of different life-form communities such as the polar bears, caribou, Arctic foxes, seals, beluga whales, northern fulmars, and those communities of organisms that inhabit the sea floor like brittle stars, worms, zooplankton, microalgae, bivalves and some of the lesser known sea spiders. And there are many more. Everyone of those global communities have an Earth right of ownership of the North and of all its natural resources. It is their birthright. They dont express themselves in English, but we understand them. Human beings have a moral obligation to protect and conserve the biodiversity of life on Earth.

The Earth management of Nunavut is an asset to Global Community and Canada. The Global Constitution shows us how it can be done with Global Law, the Earth Court of Justice, and how the Global Protection Agency (GPA) and the Agency of Global Police (AGP) can protect the territory. Global Community Arrest Warrants can be issued to anyone breaking Global Law. The GCNA Emergency, Rescue and Relief Centre is vigilant and quick in helping all life in need of help. Fot the protection of those global communities we will need to create a biodiversity zone in the North by way of Earth rights and taxation of natural resources.

Global Community is defined around a given territory, that territory being the planet as a whole, as well as a specific population, which is Global Community. Global Community has the power to make the laws of the land and to make the rules for the territory of the Earth. Global Law has been and continue to be researched and developed for this purpose.

We are all members of Global Community. We all have the duty to protect the rights and welfare of all species and all people. No humans have the right to encroach on the ecological space of other species and other people, or treat them with cruelty and violence. All life species, humans and cultures, have intrinsic worth. They are subjects, not commodities, not objects of manipulation or ownership. No humans have the right to own other species, other people or the knowledge of other cultures through patents and other intellectual property rights. Defending biological and cultural diversity is a duty of all people. Diversity is an end in itself, a value, a source of richness both material and cultural. All members of Global Community including all humans have the right to food and water, to safe and clean habitat, to security of ecological space. These rights are natural rights, they are birthrights given by the fact of existence on Earth and are best protected through global community rights and global commons. They are not given by states or corporations, nor can they be extinguished by state or corporate action. No state or corporation has the right to erode or undermine these natural rights or enclose the commons that sustain all through privatisation or monopoly control.

This letter may be a starting place for a group global discussion and roundtable on the issues of Canada sovereignty in the Nunavut and the control of the Northwest Passage. If you wish to send a reply I will post it on Global Community website at
http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/EmailDiscussions/ and
http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/GPA/2008discussionroundtables.htm

For now I started the process by researching and writing a paper concerned with the issues, and you will find the paper at
http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/GIMProceedings/gimLetterNP.htm

Maps

Ever wonder why Canadians and Mexicans were never asked in a referendum the kind of relationship we want to have with Americans and the White House? Ever wonder why Canadians and Mexicans dont have a veto power on the White House's policies and legislation, and yet we feed Americans with our resources? How is that possible? What does that do to the world, to all life on Earth, and to the next generations? As of January 30, 2008, the total U.S. federal debt held by the public was roughly $5.1 trillion and the annual deficit roughly $400 billion. They paid very little for our resources and with money they borrowed every year from China. Americans buy our ' home grown corporations ' with money they dont own. When they have not borrowed the money, they have invaded other nations and taken their resources. Blood resources. Blood money. How can we trust a partner that is basically bankrupted morally and economically? How can we let our governments be dealing with the White House on an agreement such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)?

Key words: Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and the Global Government of North America (GGNA).

Global Community voting on issues
Artwork by Germain Dufour
February 1, 2008

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, 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.

We can do better together as friends and united as a Global Government.

Read about the Canadian view point.

The Global Government of North America (GGNA) represents all citizens of the North American Community and others. Find out what it means to be united as a Global Government.

A new world to build, a future to share and protect together! 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. 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.

Canada wants a veto power on all major proposals, policies, strategies, or any action (s) submitted to the GGNA for approval.
Canada wants "direct democracy". As defined in Chapter 10.6.3 of the Global Constitution, and Section 4 on the Scale of Global Rights, direct democracy is a community right. Direct democracy is the right of global citizens to hold referendums on any issue -- and to veto legislation. No Member Nation of the GGNA is allowed to go alone (unilaterally) on any such major proposals, policies, and strategies, or any action (s) that can have an impact on all other Member Nations of the GGNA.

Ratification of the Global Constitution
People and governments from all Nations are required to sign and ratify the Global Constitution.
You can access the webpage handling this process.

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Global Community perspective on the control of the Northwest Passage, Canada sovereignty of Nunavut and 'blood resources'.

Investigative report

Global Community perspective on the control of the Northwest Passage, Canada sovereignty of Nunavut and 'blood resources'
by Germain Dufour

Key words: Canada sovereignty, Northwest Passage, criteria for sovereignty, biodiversity zone in the North, new Nunavut settlements, blood resources, Global Community, movement for taxation on natural resources, North America security for all life, Earth is the birth right of all life, Earth ownership, Scale of Global Rights, Global Law, global citizenship, Kyoto Protocol, global warming, climate change, global symbiotical relationship, Global protection Agency, Agency of Global Police, invasion of Afghanistan and Middle East, Saudi Arabia, war industry, United Nations, GCNA Emergency, Rescue and Relief Centre

Summary    
Introduction    
Who owns the Nortwest Passage? What is Canada sovereignty in the North?    
Global Community perspective    
Conclusion    
Background research for this paper: historical facts, principles, standards, articles, ways of doing things in the past, issues, maps, etc.    

This report may be a starting place for a group global discussion and roundtable on the issues of Canada sovereignty in Nunavut and the control of the Northwest Passage. If you wish to send a reply I will post it on Global Community website in the Group Discussions by email section at and in the Global Roundtable section at
For now I started the process by researching and writing a paper concerned with the issues, and you will find the research paper at

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.

http://globalcommunitywebnet.com/GlobalConstitution/
globalcommunity@telus.net
GlobalConstitution@telus.net

Global Government of North America (GGNA) with its governing institutions and bodies

GGNA vs NAFTA and the FTAA: the Canadian view point

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.

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Politics and Justice without borders: Canada and the U.S.

CANADA TODAY is under threat. The country's capacity and even existence as an independent nation, able to shape its own political, social and economic future, are at risk. Relations between Canada and the United States (US) are decidedly chilly these days: the Iraq war, trade disputes, name-calling, and bickering at the border.

It doesn't mean that the relationship will grind to a halt. With more than half a million people and a billion dollars worth of trade crossing the border daily that is not going to happen.

Every day thousands of cars, trucks, trains and planes roll across the Canada-U.S. border as more than $1 billion in trade circulates between the countries. Year in and year out, Canada and the United States are each other’s biggest trading partners. The longtime relationship is worth hundreds of billions annually. Canada’s exports to the U.S. accounted for $348.4 billion – about 84 per cent – of the $410.7 billion in goods shipped out of the country last year. Conversely, about 71 per cent of Canada’s $356 billion in imports last year arrived from the U.S. Together the United States, Canada and Mexico have a trading relationship worth more than $700 billion a year; an increase of 88 percent between 1993 and 2003.

Economic retaliation is unlikely because the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has changed the trading relationship between the two countries. Many plants in Canada now have North American product mandates and are producing for the entire Canada-U.S. market, while those in the U.S. operate in the same fashion. That means a huge amount of cross-border trade is now intra-company trade. That creates a strong incentive for business to lobby both governments to avoid economic disruptions or retaliation no matter what the nature of the relationship at the top. The U.S. has a vital interest in keeping the border open. Its economy would be hurt, whether in the integrated auto and other manufacturing sectors, or in petroleum and other vital resource sectors. Thus, both countries would be highly motivated to minimize disruptions and normalize cross-border traffic quickly should another terrorist attack occur.

The most important priority for Canadian diplomacy over the next few years is to reach a new accommodation with the United States because it is only when that relationship is comprehensible, predictable and sound that the country can again assume a meaningful world role.

There is a wide gap in attitudes between the business élite and the Canadian public. Business leaders are closer to U.S. policymakers in their attitudes on a range of issues, from the war in Iraq to missile defense to Kyoto. Unlike the general public, they favour minimalist government and low taxes. They believe we must fall into line with U.S. policies at all costs or risk our economic security. Many would like Canada to become more like the U.S. Although small in number, this group has great capacity, as the record shows, to shape the public debate and influence policmakers. Allowing corporate North America to define our interests as a nation implies, in the end, complete regulatory harmonization with the U.S. and the subordination of our economic, social, cultural, environmental and defence policies to U.S. policies. Business elites and many of our own politicians argue that Canada can and should enter into a relationship with the U.S. which is similar to the relationship between the countries of the European Union (EU). However, it is a mistake to think that harmonization or integration with the U.S. will cause the U.S. to adopt Canadian or Canada-friendly policies. While the EU countries enjoy a relatively balanced relationship, Canada and the U.S. are far from equal partners. The economic and military superpower status of the U.S. makes such balance impossible. Thus, although it is rarely acknowledged by our economic and political elites, the practical implications of closer ties to the U.S. are that Canada will be forced to adopt U.S. policies through immense economic pressure. Everything from health care to immigration to security to control of resources would be affected. How would Canada maintain any sort of distinct identity or sovereignty in such conditions? The simple answer is that it wouldn't. Canada would become an American colony in all but name; it would not become the 51st state, because that would mean political integration on a par with the level of economic integration, which is not a factor in any proposals for deep integration (FTA, NAFTA, etc.).

This is an even more pressing issue at a moment in history when the U.S. is governed by an administration that is repealing civil rights and liberties, pulling money from social programs, disputing the scientific evidence for climate change and increasing pollution, and most disturbing of all, withdrawing from agreements and treaties which have allowed the world to develop an international rule of law. While Canada remains committed to multilateralism, the U.S. has refused to participate in a long list of important international conventions and treaties, including the Kyoto Protocol, the Rome Statute of the International Criminial Court, the land mines and nuclear test ban treaties, and many others. Nor has the U.S. respected the U.N. in launching its war against Iraq, a predatory invasion of the Iraqui people for their oil & gas resources.

Meanwhile, every public opinion poll continues to demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of Canadians don't want to be just like the U.S. Canadians may respect the U.S. ideals of freedom and democracy, enjoy some U.S. movies, T.V., music and authors, and remain committed to the close neighbourly relationship between the people of the two countries, but that doesn't mean that Canadians want to adopt every aspect of U.S. policy or sacrifice our ability to make unique democratic decisions of our own. Most of us still believe that there are important differences between the U.S. and Canada, and that these differences should be preserved. Many Canadians disagree strongly with the policies of the current U.S. administration, and object to implementing similar policies here at home. Unfortunately, our voices are rarely being heard when compared with the abundant propaganda of the "continentalists", and those advocating "deep integration".

"Continentalists" and "deep integration" proponents rarely miss an opportunity to warn that another terrorist attack is inevitable and that an extended border disruption (or series of border disruptions) would be devastating for the Canadian economy unless we protect ourselves by entering into agreements with the US. What is needed, they say, is a comprehensive negotiation where trade-offs across sectors are possible.

"Deep integration" is an economic term. It refers to economic integration that goes well beyond removal of formal barriers to trade and includes various ways of reducing the international burden of differing national regulations, such as mutual recognition and harmonization. "Deep integration" means, in reality, subjugating many of Canada's policies to those of the United States — including trade, immigration, energy, water, our dollar, taxation, defence and the environment — but without any corresponding voice in the governance structure — that is, the U.S. government — where decisions affecting many aspects of Canadian life would be made.

For example, "deep integration" means:

a)     giving the US whatever access to our energy that they want, even if that means dropping our pledge to deal with climate change through the Kyoto agreement.
b)     water exports to the United States;
c)     take on major new defence expenditures (presumably by buying lots of U.S.-made military technology);
d)     give up policies on culture and agriculture, including the Canadian Wheat Board; and so on.

Canadians would not only become almost powerless in addressing their fundamental future economic concerns, but would also lose the capacity to control the social environment and the ability to adjust to change because social policy would also end up being driven by U.S. policies.

What kind of Canada do proponents envisage at the end of the proposed deep integration path? And what guarantees would we have that, no matter what economic or security integration agreements are in place, the Americans wouldn’t still close or disrupt the border? The FTA dispute mechanism was supposed to protect us from U.S. actions against softwood lumber, cattle, and other exports, but has disastrously failed to do so.

Here, then, is the real story behind “deep integration”. Canada’s business class simply cannot compete with its U.S. counterpart. They refuse to pay for the necessary research and development, refuse to train their workers, are constantly begging for more tax cuts, and are notoriously risk-averse. As well, Canadian companies are eager to simply sell out to U.S. corporations. Since 1989, more than 95 percent of foreign investment in Canada has gone to buying up Canadian companies. Head offices are pouring over the border. The sheer lack of entrepreneurial vision is evident in Bay Street’s determination to tie itself to what more and more economists are declaring a declining economic power. The growing consensus is that smart countries and companies are getting in on the game where the growth is: China, India, Brazil, Russia, and South Africa. But not Canadian companies.

One of the reasons: the US is now beginning to lose its technology-based competitive advantage. The countries of western Europe, Japan, Korea, and even China have set ambitious national goals and are building universities, inviting immigration, and have clear objectives regarding industrial development and new technologies.

The United States is the economy and country to which Canada’s business leaders want us to tie our star. But even worse, the Government of Canada and Canada's business class actually believes they can negotiate a good deal with the current U.S. administration and Congress. This is delusional, given the rapid devolution of the U.S. into an imperial theocracy. It’s time for Canadians to look elsewhere for leadership; our economy, not to mention our country, is far too important to leave to the failed imagination of Bay Street CEOs.

Under their interpretation of co-operation, Canada, the U.S. and Mexico would insulate themselves against competition from the rest of the world with a common external tariff, and with an outer security perimeter against external threats. But as fast as they would construct these walls on the outside, they would tear down almost every fence on the inside with an across-the-board harmonization of rules, regulations and laws on everything from who could seek asylum in North America to military operations to pollution and environmental controls. In fact, they would go so far as to give Canadians and Americans absolute freedom to decide where they would work and where they would live.

The Europeans have built an economic and social partnership to address shared problems by creating shared political and administrative institutions. But it would be naïve to believe that similar institutions could be effectively created and made to work genuinely in a Canada-U.S. or a Canada-U.S.-Mexico partnership. The United States, as an imperial superpower, acts on the basis of economic and military power, not shared decision-making, and, given the country's great size, would not consider serious sharing of decisions and power with a much smaller country. The United States is instinctively unilateral in its approach.

If Canada is to pursue "deep integration" with the United States, then logically we should seek political union as well so that Canadians in the different provinces would have some opportunity to influence decisions. But this logical implementation of "deep integration" would also mean the end of Canada as a distinct geopolitical entity and the conversion of our provinces into U.S. states.

Despite accelerated economic integration over the last 15 years, opinion polling reveals a deep and growing divide in attitudes and values between Canadians and Americans. It shows that the vast majority of Canadians do not want to be more like Americans. On the contrary. Nevertheless, a majority of Canadians have come to terms in principle with NAFTA, and a substantial minority favour even closer economic integration. However, most Canadians don’t understand the term economic integration, and support drops sharply the more NAFTA and deep integration initiatives are perceived to impair domestic policy freedom. For the vast majority of Canadians, continued support is contingent on maintaining policy independence and retaining Canada’s unique social character. The confusion around the issue of integration and independence is understandable. The linkages are often subtle and indirect, and it takes time for effects to become apparent. And the mainstream media gatekeepers and pundits have steered away from this issue.

"Continentalists" promote a "strategic bargain," in which Canada and the United States, over time, would move to a customs union with a common made-in-Washington trade policy toward the rest of the world and the free movement not only of goods and services but also of people and capital. (So much for maintaining Canadian ownership of banks, TV networks or transportation systems.) This would also affect foreign policy: If the United States decided to use trade measures to punish China, attack the Europeans or demonize the Cubans, we would have to follow suit.

Deep integration advocates see a customs union as the next stage in the deepening of the continental market. Key features associated with a customs union are the creation of a common external tariff applied to all nations not part of the free trade area, and the establishment of a common trade policy. However, many advocates of a customs union also insert elements of a common market into their definition. A common or single market is seen in the literature as a still deeper stage of economic integration. It would include removing barriers to trade and investment in agricultural, cultural, legal, communications, and financial services. It would include the harmonization of a vast range of regulations and policies (economic, social, environmental, cultural, immigration, etc.) to achieve the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour.

This is an important point. The lesson to recall from the FTA is that what was initially presented as a proposal for a conventionally defined free trade agreement resulted in a comprehensive deep economic integration agreement that went far beyond the border into the very heart of domestic policy-making power. An alleged customs union negotiation would be similarly open-ended, making it hard in advance to fully evaluate its costs. We also know from the FTA experience that much will be surrendered for little gain.

The standard economic case for a customs union is that removing rules of origin (which currently prevent back-door entry of imports from a non-member country into the NAFTA area through a member that has lower tariffs on the those imports) will eliminate costly administrative procedures and thereby reduce transaction costs of doing business. Proponents have built economic models that greatly exaggerate the overall efficiency gains to the economy (2-3% of GDP). Many of us remember the wildly exaggerated estimates of economic benefits of tariff elimination generated by similar models during the FTA debate. Nor do they mention possible costs of removing rules of origin as an incentive to source production within Canada. But the focus on rules of origin is a diversion The far greater cost is that a common trade policy—given the huge difference in power—would mean effectively handing over Canada’s trade policy to U.S. authorities. It would have huge implications for both our domestic institutions and our relations with the rest of the world.

Contrary to proponents’ claims that Canada’s positions and protections in multilateral trade agreements, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), are very similar to those of the U.S., there are in fact major differences between them, affecting crucial public policy areas. They include public services such as health, education, and other social services which, unlike in the U.S., are not organized on market principles; they include cultural industries, which are subsidized and regulated in direct opposition to free trade principles. Also on the table would be agricultural marketing boards, the Canadian Wheat Board, telecommunications, and banking. The U.S. has long objected to these policies and would definitely target them for elimination. In heavily protected U.S. sectors such as sugar, textiles, beef and tropical fruits, Canada would ironically be pushed to raise its tariffs to U.S. levels. It would mean complying with U.S. trade embargoes on Iran and Cuba and ending Canadian trade preferences with, for example, Commonwealth countries. And it would foreclose future independent policy initiatives. Imagine, for example, under a common trade policy persuading American drug companies and policy-makers to allow the export of cheap generic AIDS drugs to poor countries.

If, like the FTA, a negotiation were to go beyond the traditional scope of a customs union, the potential for ceding regulatory and policy space would grow exponentially. A major Canadian objective would obviously be exemption from U.S. trade protection laws. But the U.S. Congress would insist that this be off-limits and would (as it does now) say that, if Canada wants exclusion from U.S. trade laws, it has merely to adopt U.S.-style laws and practices.

Since the signing of the Free Trade Agreement, Canada's economic life has become deeply integrated into a newly developed North American economy dominated and directed by U.S. corporate and government interests. The results of this integration are now clear. As critics predicted, the free flow of capital without government regulation has resulted in job losses - 276,000 high-paying industrial jobs have been lost - and we are now even more dependent on the American economy as a destination of our exports, and therefore less able to direct our own economy.

Economic growth in the 10-plus years of free trade has been the worst since the 1930s. Following the deregulation imperative of free trade, we have both abandoned the tools of industrial development that brought us the auto industry and deliberately pursued policies that weaken the domestic economy in the interests of trade. By pursuing trade with a low Canadian dollar we have exposed Canadian industry to the most extensive and prolonged sell-off of Canadian assets in our history.

The results of this for ordinary working Canadians have been the longest period of stagnation in standard of living levels in the country's history, a dramatic erosion of social programs and protection for workers, extreme levels of economic insecurity for millions of workers and their families, and a loss of democratic control by citizens over the future of their communities. All of these economic facts can be traced primarily to the FTA and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The nature of those binding and legal agreements prevents from reconsidering our options.

After a decade of rapid integration with the United States and the harmonization of public policy with that country, Canada is experiencing the fastest and most dramatic increases in social and economic inequality in its history. The severe erosion of programs such as UI/EI, social assistance and income redistribution, and the erosion of our progressive tax system, have systematically changed the relationship between individual citizens and their community - because government is a reflection of community. As citizens perceive government as less and less relevant to them, we feel less and less commitment to the collective that is neighbourhood, community and country.

Economic integration with the United States is changing our very definition and conception of culture and therefore our sense of who we are. In the United States, culture is seen as a commodity no different from any other commodity - it is equated with entertainment in the marketplace. Canada's efforts to promote our unique identity and reflect it to ourselves confront increased burdens as the United States watches over any "unfair subsidies" to our so-called "cultural industries." As we become integrated with the most powerful example of consumer society in the world, we face the threat of commodification of our cultural traditions and their gradual assimilation into the American entertainment industry.

When Canada signed the FTA and NAFTA it agreed to do what literally no other country in the world has ever agreed to. It agreed to give up, forever (barring the abrogation of the trade agreements themselves), the legislative and regulatory authority to protect and conserve the country's energy resources for its own needs. In effect, we have completely abandoned that part of our national sovereignty that allowed us to determine our energy policy based on the current and future needs of Canadian consumers - both individual and industrial. It is perhaps the most stunning and dramatic example of the abandonment of the national interest by any government in the history of Canada.

But it is not just oil and gas that have been affected by our free trade relationship with the United States. The free trade imperative is now threatening to force deregulation of electricity as well. Our water is threatened by provisions in NAFTA that define water as a "good" and therefore tradable, opening up the possibility that U.S. water shortages will be met by the diversion of Canadian rivers.

Canada's environment is increasingly threatened by the nearly total integration of the North American economy. Canada's ability to meet the requirements of environmental treaties has already been seriously compromised by a NAFTA case that successfully challenged our attempt to halt the cross-border movement of toxic waste. Since the signing of the free trade agreement the federal government has attempted to pass just two new pieces of environmental legislation. Both failed the free trade test and were, in effect, overturned by the provisions of NAFTA. It is impossible to know how many other pieces of legislation were considered by the government but rejected. The chill effect - declining to pass legislation for fear it will attract a costly NAFTA or WTO challenge - has crippled Canada's ability to pass laws and regulations to protect its own environment.

For decades Canada occupied a unique and often very difficult terrain in the international field. A small country by population standards and dwarfed by the American colossus on its border, Canada nonetheless wielded the influence of a middle power much larger than its size would have suggested. We were once seen by developing countries and other smaller powers as a voice of internationalism and multilateralism. We often championed human rights and took a leading role in the boycott of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Canada's foreign aid was generous and the Canadian International Development Agency had a reputation for taking a genuine interest in development issues. It was not just an agency promoting Canadian industry and foreign trade. Since the 1960s Canada developed and maintained a reputation for being a nation committed to peacekeeping, indeed defined the modern notion of that international role. The past 13 years of the new free trade relationship with the United States, in which Canada's commitment to free-market policies of economic globalization has increased, have witnessed a fundamental shift in Canada's foreign policy and its peacekeeping tradition. Right now, Canada has soldiers fighting in an undeclared war and the Canadian command has absolutely no say in directing them. They are not peacekeepers; they are not even Canadian soldiers. They are, in effect, American conscripts.

If Canada was to go along the United States on the integration of Canadian forces under the new U.S. Northern Command, or on ballistic missile defense, Canada would squander the respect Canada gained within the international community for its stand on the Iraq war, reinforcing the image of Canada as a mere proxy for the superpower.

Canada's generous foreign aid policy has been replaced by a diminished contribution to developing nations and an extremely aggressive trade policy that mimics that of the United States and is in complete support of the structural adjustment policies of the IMF and the World Bank. CIDA is now a shameless promoter of Canadian industry - including the nuclear industry - and has tarnished its reputation as a development agency. Canada, partly through deliberate policy shifts and partly because it feels it cannot risk offending what is now its almost exclusive trading partner, has become little more than an echo of American foreign policy interests.

In the context of the new imperatives of the economic globalization, both sovereignty and democracy have suffered. Economic globalization has demanded of nations that they give up those aspects of sovereignty that allow for democracy. A nation's ability to regulate and guide economic development and the actions of capital are key to a nation's well-being in a free market system. The signing of the FTA and NAFTA have fundamentally altered Canada's sovereignty and its democracy. In order for Canada to create a "level playing field" with the United States it has systematically gutted its social programs, its progressive tax system, its commitment to industrial development, and its laws and regulations balancing the power of employees and employers.

In order to accomplish this free trade objective, the Canadian and provincial governments and other political institutions have gone to great lengths to lower Canadians' expectations of democratic governance. Using scare tactics regarding the large deficits of the early 1990s, the deliberate misrepresentation of government employees, huge cuts to health and education budgets, and a relentless campaign to promote tax cuts, governments at all levels have convinced many Canadians that their values can no longer be reflected in government policy. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that as a result of this campaign, and the cuts to government services, democracy in Canada is in crisis. Unprecedented levels of cynicism and anger toward government and political parties have led to the lowest voter turn-outs in the country's history.

The denigration of Canadian political institutions and democracy has been accompanied by a growing and alarming disregard for civil liberties and human rights in this country. Nowhere is the link between globalization and trade and the downsizing of democracy more obvious. The rapid Americanization of Canada's institutions and political culture demands both long-term and immediate action. Only by giving Canadians a genuine opportunity to engage in a dialogue about their country and its future direction can this alarming erosion of democratic participation and the resulting decline of the nation be halted and eventually reversed.

The aftermath of September 11 taught us a great deal about how deeper economic integration has heightened our vulnerability. It reminded us that the Bush administration will not hesitate to unilaterally rewrite the terms and conditions of entry into its market, regardless of NAFTA; it will not hesitate to link our compliance with its security demands to access to the United States market. It reminded us that we have a border and that it matters. It reminded us that we are different and that our different laws and institutions are under siege. People are beginning to connect integration and loss of independence: NAFTA meant deeper economic integration and increased vulnerability which, with September 11, meant the Smart Border Accord, which in turn meant pressure for still deeper integration.

To want to chart a different course does not imply a better course. This is not about moral superiority, or being anti-American. It is simply that we have different values and interests. We want to be able to reaffirm and preserve our founding myths, our historical experiences, and the values that have shaped and defined us. We want our laws and institutions to reflect our unique social character and our successful blend of individual and collective rights. We want to chart a course that affirms our highly original political experiment: our complex (tri-national and multicultural) federation with its long and extraordinary history of resolving tensions and conflicts peacefully. We also want, as we have in the past, to make our mark in the world: to help strengthen the fabric of international law, to advance world peace, social justice, democracy, and the environmental sustainability of the planet.

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Canada - United States Northwest Passage water dispute

Politics and Justice without borders: Canada, the U.S. and Mexico

In 1994, along with Mexico, Canada and the United States enact the North American Free Trade Agreement, aimed at eliminating tariffs on trade between the signing countries. Over the past decade, several other agreements were signed between these three countries. One of them was concernend with refugees. Formally signed by Canada and the U.S. in December 2002, the Safe Third Country Agreement stipulates that refugees must seek asylum in whichever of the two countries they reach first. The new rules would eliminate the practice of asylum shopping by refugee applicants by allowing their return to the last safe country from which they came. The agreement prevents asylum-seekers from using Canada as a “foot-in-the-door” to the U.S. or vice versa. Border official have subsequently said the new legislation will force more refugees to cross the border illegally. Bill C-11 was brought into force two weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. It provides for a more thorough refugee screening process than previously used. Before the bill was passed, applicants would be photographed, fingerprinted and checked for a criminal record. If they seemed law-abiding and legitimate as applicants, they would be allowed into the country to settle while they awaited a formal hearing. A full criminal check wouldn’t be held until they were accepted at the hearing. Under C-11, the security check is done at the border. Under the new rules the applicant is interviewed up to five hours to determine if he or she is a genuine refugee. That’s followed by a security check by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). If there is any suspicion, the RCMP and FBI can be called upon for assistance. The entire process is to be done within 72 hours. If it is determined they are not a genuine refugee, or they fail the security check, they are deported. Otherwise they are allowed into Canada to await a formal hearing. Although Bill C-11 was in the works prior to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, it was implemented two months before being passed.

Canada, the United States, and Mexico have agreed on a framework to implement the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. Both opponents and proponents of the agreement say that this is the most important step in the integration of North America since NAFTA was signed more than a decade ago.

As liberal democracies, the three governments of North America also share common principles: protecting individual rights, upholding the rule of law, and ensuring equality of opportunity for their citizens. North America, in short, is more than an expression of geography. It is a partnership of sovereign states with overlapping economic and security interests, where major developments in one country can and do have a powerful impact on the other two.

North America is also energy interdependent. In 2005, Canada and Mexico were the two largest exporters of oil to the United States. Canada supplies the United States with roughly 90 percent of its imported natural gas and all of its imported electricity.

In March 2005, the leaders of Canada, Mexico, and the United States adopted a Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), establishing ministerial level working groups to address key security and economic issues facing North America and setting a short deadline for reporting progress back to their governments. To that end, the Task Force proposes the creation by 2010 of a North American community to enhance security, prosperity, and opportunity. The Task Force proposed a community based on the principle that “our security and prosperity are mutually dependent and complementary.” Its boundaries will be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter within which the movement of people, products, and capital will be legal, orderly, and safe. Its goal will be to guarantee a free, secure, just, and prosperous North America.

On the economic side, for instance, the initiative is aimed at both increasing productivity within the three nations and also at making their markets more competitive with the European Union and China. Joint undertakings could include standardizing some regulations on businesses, making it easier for business people to move across borders, increasing cooperation on energy exploration and moving toward a common external tariff for certain North American products sold to other economic blocs.

A U.S.-Canada-Mexico task force has made some bold recommendations, including a North American border pass based on fingerprints or eye scans to speed border crossings. The Task Force on the Future of North America also advocated an "outer security perimeter" around the three countries, to be achieved by harmonizing visa and asylum regulations, integrating "watch" lists, conducting joint law enforcement training, setting up a "marine defense command" to protect North American ports and pursuing closer military cooperation with Mexico.

In 1993, the United States, Mexico, and Canada adopted a labor side accord to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), pledging to work toward broad improvements in the situation of labor rights in their respective countries. Seven years after the agreement entered into force, however, the record shows that the three countries have failed to live up to this commitment. While the accord, known formally as the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), has suffered from structural defects from the outset, it nevertheless holds far greater potential to promote workers' rights and high labor standards than its limited use by the signatory states would suggest. Instead of exploiting this potential, the NAFTA countries have ensured the accord's ineffectiveness in protecting workers' rights.

The NAALC, for all its deficiencies in practice, remains the most ambitious link between labor rights and trade ever implemented. It broke new ground by creating labor-related obligations and establishing sanctions for failure to fulfill them in certain cases. Under the accord, the signatories must ensure that labor laws and regulations provide for "high labor standards;" they must strive to improve those standards; and they must ensure access to "fair, equitable, and transparent" mechanisms for enforcing their labor law. The accord obligates the parties to effectively enforce their own labor law in eleven key subject areas, and stipulates that a "pattern of practice" of non-compliance (more than one incident) in certain subject areas could lead to the appointment of an outside panel of experts to recommend measures to resolve the problem. A "persistent pattern" of non-enforcement (a sustained or recurring pattern of practice) could lead to the convocation of an arbitral panel and the imposition of sanctions.

As initially conceived and negotiated, NAFTA included no provisions to protect labor rights in its text or through a side agreement. The NAALC that was finally negotiated by Canada, Mexico, and the United States sidestepped thorny international political issues by avoiding any suggestion that it was intended to harmonize labor standards in the three countries, and by ruling out the establishment of multinational judicial processes or appeals procedures. Rather, it aims to promote broad improvements in the labor rights situation in the signatory countries, and it relies on political engagement between the parties as the means to address its violations. Nongovernmental organizations and individuals also play a part by signaling to the governments involved when the obligations established by the accord have not been met.

The NAALC does not incorporate international labor rights norms; instead, it calls on the signatories to enforce their domestic labor standards effectively while working cooperatively with the International Labor Organization (ILO). Interestingly, the labor principles subject to NAALC consideration include a wider range of issues than the ILO's core standards, including protections for migrant workers and workers' compensation.

The NAALC does not purport to resolve labor rights problems in specific cases. A worker unjustly fired for organizing a union in the United States, for example, could not expect a case filed under the NAALC to lead to job reinstatement. Fixing problems with the enforcement of laws designed to protect freedom of association, however, would fall squarely within the accord's obligations. Similarly, a Mexican worker victimized by an unfair labor tribunal could not expect a NAALC-based process to correct the legal deficiencies suffered in the case heard domestically, but could legitimately expect the pact to contribute to a general improvement in Mexico's labor tribunals.

Even with these limitations, the NAALC has the potential to be a much more effective mechanism for promoting labor rights than it has been, in practice, to date. For example, if they had the necessary political will, the signatories could use the NAALC's framework to identify longstanding weaknesses in labor rights protections and develop comprehensive plans to remedy them. They could contribute to the development of labor law policy in their respective countries by promoting higher standards. And they could contribute to the wider international debate about how to link labor rights and trade.

An important structural weakness of the NAALC is its lack of an independent oversight body. Thus, for example, if the United States violates one of its NAALC obligations, Mexico or Canada can either separately or jointly push for a remedy. In practice, however, in deciding whether to do so they are likely to also take account of other issues relevant to their bilateral relations with the United States, such as immigration, narcotics control, and the promotion of trade. So it is scarcely surprising that the NAALC's potential as a means for promoting respect for, and improvements in, labor rights has been dramatically underused.

The NAALC signatories have taken advantage of the accord's silence on how to deal with allegations of non-compliance with its obligations. National Administrative Offices (NAOs), which were created in each signatory country to address instances of non-compliance, have complete discretion to determine which complaints to accept and how to investigate and report on them. Similarly, the accord sets out no standards regarding how labor ministries in the three signatory states should design programs to address instances of non-compliance with NAALC obligations. As a result, the governments have sometimes ignored issues raised by petitioners, reported on issues but then failed to include them in government-to-government talks, or included them in bilateral discussions but established no mechanism for remedying the problems identified.

The accord permits the establishment of an outside panel of experts known as an Evaluation Committee of Experts (ECE) and an arbitral panel to address non-compliance with the obligation to enforce certain NAALC labor principles. However, it is vague on what to do when the accord's other obligations are not met. The obligation to have high labor standards, to strive to improve those standards, and to provide access to fair labor tribunals cannot by themselves be brought before such bodies. This constitutes a serious problem, because these obligations are fundamental to the ability of any government to enforce its labor law. In addition, the failure of a signatory government to enforce laws related to three fundamental labor rights-freedom of association and the right to organize, the right to bargain collectively, and the right to strike-cannot be brought before an expert committee or sanctions panel at all.

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