The Livable Blog

More evidence that perseverance and grassroots organizing pays off. Congratulations to the Council of Canadians and particularly Paul Manly from Nanaimo who contributed so much to the campaign!

The SPP was about facilitating trade at the expense of the environment and human rights, goals rather like the federal Gateway strategy.

The SPP is dead, so where's the champagne?

By Stuart Trew | August 19, 2009

"The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) is no longer an active initiative and as such this website will act as an archive for SPP documents. There will not be any updates to this site." - Disclaimer from the U.S. government's SPP website.

In October 2007, Globe and Mail reporter John Ibbitson predicted that a then two-year-old effort to deepen and expand NAFTA called the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) would die unless North American leaders put some backbone into it.

Too much of the discussion was happening behind closed doors, wrote Ibbitson, himself a big supporter of the SPP and one of the only journalists to ever write about it in the Canadian media. "If you're going to negotiate freer trade," he said, "sing it from the rooftops.

Keep the media informed. Make it a Big Deal."

Well governments didn't sing (or not loudly enough), barely informed the media, and it fell to alter-globalization and social justice movements in Canada, Mexico and the United States, including the Council of Canadians, to highlight its many flaws. As a result, the NAFTA-plus agenda died in Guadalajara, Mexico last week. We killed it. And we should be singing it from the rooftops.

[snip]

It's time to regroup and rethink, for sure. But please let's do it with a bottle of champagne -- even if it's one from the cheap shelf.

The SPP is dead and we killed it.

Let's recognize what we have achieved and then get back to work.

Stuart Trew is trade campaigner for the Council of Canadians.

Full text at http://www.rabble.ca/news/2009/08/spp-dead-so-wheres-champagne