The Power of Fast Tracking

by Naomi Klein, Wednesday, February 7, 2001 in the Toronto Globe & Mail

 When Prime Minister Jean Chrétien went to the White House on Monday, he said he felt like "kind of a cousin coming to visit."

What kind of cousin? From the looks of it, a very poor cousin.

When asked at the post-meeting press conference to name the greatest challenge facing U.S.-Canada relations, President George W. Bush didn't bother mentioning any of the numerous ongoing disputes between the two countries. He didn't say oil drilling in Alaska, softwood lumber or farm subsidies.

What he said was "fast track" -- the freedom granted to U.S. presidents to negotiate trade agreements without having them amended by Congress. "We have a lot of work to do for me to get fast track," was Mr. Bush's answer. We? Surely that's a matter for the U.S. Congress and the American people to decide. A domestic issue, not an international one.

Only it turns out Canada can help -- in fact, we are already helping. Last week, former prime minister and free-trade architect Brian Mulroney kindly explained how. Citing conversations at "the highest reaches" of the new U.S. administration, Mr. Mulroney said Mr. Chrétien can "help persuade the American Congress to grant Mr. Bush fast track" by using the Summit of the Americas, coming to Quebec City this April, to help Mr. Bush "look good internationally."

Sure, fashion adviser to a U.S. presidential debutante is not the most dignified of roles on the world stage. But it is absolutely crucial to the advancement of free trade, an agenda that has yet to recover from the collapse of the World Trade Organization negotiations in Seattle.

If Canada helps Mr. Bush secure fast track, both countries can move forward with item No. 1 on the Summit of the Americas agenda: the creation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas, the largest free-trade zone in the world.

Next, Mr. Bush will be able to barrel ahead with a new round of negotiations at the WTO meeting, set to take place this fall in Qatar. As in the FTAA negotiations, more market access to services such as health care and education are on the agenda.

On the other hand, if Mr. Bush can't get fast track, both of these great leaps forward for free trade will be glued to the ground. Many countries believe there is no point in haggling over intricate multilateral agreements that can be unilaterally altered by the U.S. Congress.

Which is where Canada comes in, and our new national mission of "making W. looking good." Fast-track legislation is stalled over the issue of labour and environmental standards in a trade agreement: Many Democrats want them, while Republicans have traditionally hated them. Only now is that starting to change.

There is broad recognition in the United States that adding some kind of language about labour and the environment -- no matter how weak and unenforceable -- is the only way to break the fast-track deadlock. So American industry, after lobbying against so-called "social clauses" for a decade, appears to be doing an about-face. According to Saturday's Wall Street Journal, many large U.S. multinationals, including Caterpillar and Boeing, are now actively pushing for inclusion of the clauses.

And when industry changes strategy, the trade negotiators are never far behind. A secret report from one of the nine groups negotiating the agreement showed no environmental and labour standards in the body of the text -- only vague language in the document preamble. In the past two weeks, however, Mr. Chrétien has launched a major fast-track-friendly makeover of the FTAA.

While at the White House, Mr. Chrétien said the Quebec summit will not focus solely on economic matters such as market access, but also on "strengthening democracy and fostering social inclusion."

Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew told students at Laval University last week that "Canada has a duty to put a human face on globalization . . . to ensure that the winners are not always the rich."

The rebranding of FTAA as a form of foreign aid, and the new openness to "social clauses," should cause moderate unions and environmentalists to seriously re-examine their trade strategies. The call for these limited clauses, tacked on to fundamentally flawed and undemocratic trade agreements, is a relic from a different time, a time when the momentum for further trade liberalization seemed unstoppable.

In today's climate, they are clearly a strategy of containment, a way to pit the protest groups that Mr. Pettigrew labels "reasonable" and "credible" against the ones he dismisses as "irresponsible, more radical" and "vehement."

With mass demonstrations planned for Quebec City and support for free trade dropping, there is an opportunity to call for a radically different trade strategy -- one that doesn't begin by empowering politicians with "fast track" but demands that the process be slowed way down, and opened right up.