A Speech Delivered by the Honourable Paul Hellyer at the Save Canada Conference held in Ottawa August 20 and 21, 1999

What I'm going to say is not so pleasant. What I'm going to give you is a frightening overview of the bad things that are happening to us as individuals to Canada and to the world.

We are being led down the garden path. Sylvia Ostrey, who is one of Canada's better-known economists and who was one of our chief negotiators at the Uruguay Round of negotiations at the World Trade Organization, is on record as saying that when they started negotiations, she had no idea how much national sovereignty would be given up and had no vision of what it would all look like when they were finished.

Just a few weeks ago, Dr. Ronald Lehman, a chief U.S. strategist for three administrations, Republican and Democrat, addressed a group in Toronto for breakfast. I'm not exactly sure why he was there, but I think it was to shore up Canadian support for various American initiatives. What he said, in effect was that they do not have a vision of what the world will look like after globalization.Can you imagine starting out on a trip like that without a road map? Well, that's what we've done.

I can give you a fairly accurate picture of what globalization is accomplishing. Universal access to health care is being cut back in Canada and around the world. I don't think there is a single exception. Universal access to education is being cut back in Canada and all around the world. Concern for the environment is being cut back in Canada and all around the world. Unemployment has been high in Canada — 8 per cent, one million people, looking for jobs, eating their hearts out. It's absolutely, totally immoral and it's the same all around the world- 350 million people are unemployed and a total of about one billion people are either unemployed or underemployed. It's a genuine tragedy.

The only exception, of course, is in the United States which is using the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to blast its way into Third World markets. And it has the added advantage of its currency being the international currency of exchange. In fact, the only beneficiaries of globalization are the officers, directors and principal shareholders of multinational corporations who don't seem to give a damn about anybody else.

A few weeks ago in Montreal at McGill University, there was a meeting that could only be described as a love-in between George Bush and Brian Mulroney. It was to mark the tenth anniversary of the signing of the Free Trade Agreement, and our former prime minister boasted of his accomplishments. He said his trilogy — free trade, the goods and services tax and high interest rates — had paved the way to prosperity.

Talk about lies and half-truths! Pages and pages of propaganda in our papers for days after, and there was scant mention that the 10 years since the FTA was signed has been the worst decade for Canada since the Great Depression of the '30s- and the second worst decade for this whole 20th century. Family income stagnated; unemployment soared. If that's Mulroney's definition of success, I wonder what his definition of failure would be?

In the 1988 election, the prime minister assured us that what he wanted was guaranteed access to the U.S. markets. That's what it was all about.

What a crock that was! Just ask the softwood lumber producers who have had tariffs and quotas imposed on their exports. Ask the steelmakers. Ask the cement makers. Ask the Manitoba farmers who had their trucks stopped at the border. There is no such thing as guaranteed free access to the U. S. markets. As soon as imports begin to impinge heavily on local industry, American politicians find some way of impending the flow.

But that wasn't Mulroney's biggest deceit, however. His number one whopper was to pretend that the Free Trade Agreement was a free trade agreement — that it was about trade. The trade part of the deal was not the important part at all. Sure, it affected some tariffs. But they were going to come down anyway under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. It was an investment agreement. The Americans wanted access to our industries and our resources and especially to our water. It was an oversight of unforgivable magnitude and, had we been told the truth, we might have rebelled at the time. Instead of saying, as he did that "Canada is open for business", he should have said "Canada is now up for sale".

In allowing the Americans to insert the "national treatment" clause, which was an absolutely new concept in international law, and gave U.S. investors the same rights in Canada as Canadian citizens, Mr. Mulroney accomplished two things. First he virtually guaranteed the demise of Canada as a nation state. Second, he allowed Ronald Reagan, with one stroke of the pen, to do what American general and American armies have been unable to do several times, and that was to conquer Canada. The conquest is still tentative for perhaps two more years.

Yesterday, Archbishop Lazarre was kind enough to say that I had some gift of prophecy. I seldom pat myself on the back, but I do have a pretty good instinct for what is going to happen. I don't know how anybody could listen to Richard Wolfson and David Cadman and other speakers and know what's going on in the world and think that we've got many more years to get our act together — and that is the reason for this conference. We are getting very, very close to the point of no return, after which nothing can be done. So we have to find out now if anyone cares. Do you want to be Americans by default? I hope not.

The national treatment clause is not only the provision that will kill Canada, but it is the means by which transnational corporations and international banks are colonizing the world. It's been stated so often here today that we can't consider Canada in isolation from what's going on in the world.

True, we're all in this leaky boat together. They are using this clause to make vassals of us all. Their powers under the national treatment clause are the foundation of an evil empire every bit as bad and probably worse with its ultimate consequences than the evil empire which was the Soviet Union.

Several hundred years of experiment in popular democracy are going down the drain. Democracy is being replaced by a new form of monarchy. A look at the American experience tells us the story.

Incidentally, I'm not anti-American. My friends are not anti-American. There are people there who think exactly as we do and it cuts right across the political spectrum, from left to right. David Korten, who wrote that wonderful book, When Corporations Rule the World, would have come today, if he hadn't been on holiday, in order to express solidarity with our concerns with what's going on in Canada and in the world.

Our quarrel is not with the American people. Our quarrel is with the American government and the transnational corporations that run the American government.

Well, the American War of Independence was about who was going to govern and, allegedly, the problem with England about tea taxes. Benjamin Franklin tells us in his memoirs that it was about money. London insisted the colonies could not print their own money. They had, instead, to borrow from British banks and pay back principal and interest in gold, which they did not have. There was a system of financial slavery and you've been talking about it here today. It's something that not a lot of people understand and it's absolutely fundamental to what's going on, both in our country and around the world.

While victory and battle transferred sovereignty from England and from the monarch there to the people, not all Americans were treated equally, of course. The landed white gentry had a great advantage; whereas the slaves, the natives, the women and the poor were not considered as people. It took them a long time to achieve that equality, to be known as persons, even in theory.

Their victory — if it was a victory — was short-lived because there was a parallel development that made the advantage of the new rights an advantage that didn't last very long.

It was the development of the corporation as a vehicle for the production and distribution of goods and services. At first, the corporations owed their existence to the sovereign people. Consequently, their objects were limited. They could only do certain things. Often their charters were limited and only allowed to run for so many years, after which they had to account for their actions in order to have their charters renewed. The directors were liable for misdemeanors. They had stakeholders rather than shareholders.

In time, this accountability became irksome and so they [the corporations] used their power and influence to remove the restraints, one by one. Their objectives were broadened so that they could invest in anything and do just about anything. The directors' liability was limited to a very narrow range and charters were granted in perpetuity so that corporations would outlive the people they were designed to serve.

Most important of all, the United States Supreme Court granted corporations the status of persons and this was a profound advantage. That was the beginning of the Takings Law. This is a concept of law which was foreign to our experience and which the U.S. rammed down our throats in NAFTA. It is the law under which we are being taken to the cleaners under Chapter 11 of NAFTA and I don't have to repeat the consequences of that. [Chapter 11 forces governments to compensate corporations for potential profit loss due to legislation. Ethyl Corporation launched a suit against the federal government when Ottawa tried to limit use of the gasoline additive, MMT. The Chretien government backed down.] Not only did we pay for their [Ethyl's] legal expenses, but I think, far worse, we had two ministers of the Crown stand and read statements saying that MMT, the gasoline additive which was the contentions product, was injurious to neither the environment nor health — at the very time that the latest scientific evidence was showing us that just the opposite was true and that it was, in fact, injurious to health, and especially to children.

It boggles my mind that we could give corporations enough power that they could tell our Parliament to revoke a law, pay them damages and get up and read something that isn't true. Absolutely incredible! That's what globalization is all about.

Well the power of transnationals is now so great that the whole purpose of the American War of Independence has been aborted. Transnationals are now the kings and queens of the world. Some laughingly call it market economics, but really it's the pursuit of unbridled, near-absolute power. That's what it's all about and globalization is just a code word for corporatisation and colonization. The transnationals want to re-engineer the world in such a way that they don't have to pay taxes to support social security and fix pot holes in the roads or maintain parks, and don't have to pay their employees decent wages.

What they're doing is they're re-creating the conditions that existed in the time of Dickens, the Dickensian era. They're moving production to places, such as Honduras, where they pay women absolute starvation wages, working 13 hours a day, up to seven days a week — no environmental standards, no health care. If they get pregnant, they get fired. If they get sick, they get fired. This erases 100 years of the legislation which gave workers rights, such as holidays with pay and pensions and protection against injury and so on — and the benefits of unionization.

Well, the process has reached the point where Lewis Lapham, editor Harpers Magazine, says the U.S. has two governments: the permanent and the provisional. The permanent government consists of the Fortune 500 magazine's largest companies, also the largest law firms and public relations firms in Washington that work for those companies, and the top bureaucrats, both civil and military and they're the permanent government. Then there is what they call an election every once in a while and they elect the provisional government and they elect actors that come on stage and read the script written by the permanent government.

You know, it used to make me so mad when people would say it doesn't matter who you elect, the Liberals or the Conservatives. The reason it made me mad was because I knew there was a lot of truth in it. And now the permanent government picks the provisional government to try to get actors who will go on stage without too much improvisation. Some people read better than others, stick to the script, and the permanent government gives them money and gets them elected and no one else need apply.

You were probably following the papers a few days ago where they had the straw vote in Idaho. Who won? George Bush. Why did he win? He spent the most money — because he had corporate backing. Who will be the friendliest president if he's elected to the corporate regime? George Bush. Absolutely!

As a result, the United States government has become little more than a big bully enforcer for the big American corporations. If Time Warner says it wants a bigger chunk of the Canadian advertising revenue, it tells the American government to go get it and they do. Then they threaten to have a trade war with us. Finally, when they don't know whether we're serious or not, we capitulate — and our government calls it a victory!

Well it's a victory all right, but not for us. Split run magazines are the worst form of dumping that I can think of. If the shoe was on the other foot, Americans would not put up with it for one minute. They would do what we should do and just impose a dumping duty — the difference between what they pay for a page of advertising in the United States and what they pay for a page of advertising in Canada. That would end split run magazines. That's what should happen to them.

If Dole and Chiquita should decide that they want a bigger share of the European banana market, the American government goes to bat for them. It threatens a trade war with Europe. What it does not take into account is the fact that the bananas that are being sold there come from small producers in the Caribbean — most of them women — and they will not be able to compete. If they lose their plantations, they will lose their livelihood and their security. Their land will be taken over by the big agro-businesses and they will be nothing but part time, temporary workers, the rest of the year unemployed. That is what globalization does. People don't matter in a globalized society. Only corporations do. If the United States wants to open up global markets for Monsanto, it just uses those pressure tactics.

I think one of the most alarming revelations made this weekend has been that Canada aids and abets the U.S. in trying to force Monsanto's often evil products — such as terminator seeds, seeds that grow crops but can't be replanted because they're genetically sterile and won't grow another crop — and we are helping the American government by going along with this sort of thing.

They want to buy our industries. Over the 10 years since Free Trade came in, thousands and thousands of Canadian industries have been sold, mostly to Americans. Now they're getting the big ones: MacMillan Bloedel - not a murmur from our government; La Group Forest — not a word; Canadian Club Monaco; a piece-by-piece sale of Rogers' Cantel.

Do you know about the salami theory? You cut off a little slice, so little that no one knows the difference, and then another little slice, and another little slice, until finally, there's nothing left but the string. Well that's what AT&T is doing with Cantel and eventually there'll be nothing left but the string.

CNR? 75 per cent owned in the United States. CPR will soon be forced to follow. They're talking about increasing the ownership limit for our two airlines. They'll both be controlled in the United States. Nothing is sacred! Not even Laura Secord! This was a symbol of resistance that reminded us that we won the war of 1812, thanks to people like Laura Secord. We're losing this one without a shot being fired.

This kind of democracy in which governments are little more than water boys for the big corporations, it may be democracy but it's a joke. Yet it is the kind of democracy that is being imposed on countries all over the world. The new kings and queens want to be able to rent politicians who will play the game their way. And that way includes what is euphemistically called economic reform — a perverted way of describing total subjugation to the new kings and queens of business and finance. It means signing treaties that allow them to cherry pick our best resources and our best industries — the same all around the world. All this is tried in the name of laissez faire economics which insists that governments are bad and markets are good. Government-owned services must be privatized, even basic services like health and education which came to be recognized as legitimate areas of government concern. They new providers, alas, are accountable, not to the sovereign citizens, but to the sovereign shareholders.

One of the most alarming things, again, that we've heard today — it wasn't entirely new — was that in the next round of negotiations under the World Trade Organization, health care and education are going to be up for grabs and we will lose all control of those as well.

Well this brand of economics, now called neo-classical economics, or neo-classical monetarist economics, is the brainchild of Milton Friedman and his colleagues at the University of Chicago. They shouldn't call it neo (new) because it's old. It's the pre-depression system, the boom/bust system that gave us the crash of '29, the depression of the'30s, and World War II, and now they're setting us up for another one. It's not a good system. Mainstream economists won't admit it, but their 25-year experiment in neo-classical economics has been a monumental flop.

The Canadian performance has been humiliating. I'd like to give you a few important statistics so when you go back you'll be able to refute some of this non-sense about our present economic system being good for Canada and good for the world and the wave of the future.

We sort of divide the system into two parts: before 1974, when we had what they call the Keynesian years when central banks actually helped central governments finance various things, and then the 25 years after 1974 when central banks stopped helping governments by providing them with low-cost money and when they adopted the monetarist neo-classical brand of economics. So in Canada, for example — in that earlier period, the average increase in Gross National Product was 4.9 per cent; in the years since, 2.8 per cent: a 43 per cent reduction. And that, if we hadn't lost it, would have been enough to pay for our health care and our education and our environmental concerns and all of the other things that we haven't been able to do. We could have done them if we hadn't run the system into the ground in that way.

Both inflation and unemployment would have been higher in that early period. From 1949 to 1973, the Consumer Price Index increased by an average of 2.86 per cent, whereas from 1974 to 1998, it increased by an average of 5.62 per cent each year — an increase of 97 per cent. Unemployment for the earlier 25 years averages 4.74 per cent and for the last 25 years, 9 per cent — 90 per cent more men and women unemployed and on the breadlines since this new, wonderful ne-classical system of economics was put into effect. Boy! If that's progress!

An finally, the debt. In that first period, the federal debt increased by 76 per cent. Since 1974, it has increased by 2,289 per cent! And this is not primarily due to overspending on health and education, as the right wing economists and politicians will tell you. It is primarily due to slower growth and debt compounding at high interest rates set by the monetarists.

The experience in Australia was very similar. The growth rate was 43 per cent less in the 20 years after neo-classical economies came into effect; the Consumer Price Index was more than twice as high and unemployment soared from under 2 per cent to the 8 to 9 per cent range.Even in the U.S., the comparison is dismal. The average increase in GDP was down by 38 per cent and unemployment has been 42 per cent higher. Their federal debt soared by more than 1,000 per cent.

But the global statistics are the ones that make me shudder. From 1950 to 1973, the average annual compound growth rate of per capita GDP in the world was 2.9 per cent. In the years since, it was down to a disastrous 1.11 per cent — less than half.

And so when you listen to all of these people or if you go to these countries that Shirley [Carr] was telling us about, you see the poverty and see the kids can't afford to go to school and have no health care and have no hope. It is because of this terrible economic system that's been pressed on them by the north. They've been told it's their salvation when, in fact, it has been just the opposite.

All of these examples are very disturbing. But what does it mean for us Canadians and for each one of us as individuals?

If you are a doctor or a nurse, chances are you are overworked — sometimes to the point that patient care is compromised. The same kind of stress is true for many teachers.

If you are a student, you may have to borrow a lot of money to finish your college or university education — assuming you can borrow, which is becoming increasingly difficult. Some of you will go further into debt than my generation did to buy a house. Should you be a challenged student, you may find that money is no longer available to provide the kind of special help you need to develop to your maximum.

If you are someone who believes that there is more to life than just those things that money can buy, you may find that music or drama or both have been eliminated from the curriculum.

If you are a farmer, you may find that you can't compete with international agri-business. And if you hang in, you may find Monsanto pushing you around and you may become hostage to the transnational monarchs. Bend the knee or starve.

If you are mentally challenged, you may live or you may die because the market has no place for you.

And no matter who you are, if you lack the proper skills, you will probably spend much of your life unemployed because globalized markets, as has been pointed out, do not provide full employment. They're not designed to provide full employment. To provide jobs for everyone would require the reimposition of demand managements, a kind of government intervention in the marketplace — a neo-classical no-no.

No one is secure. Your company may be sold out to one of the transnationals and either downsized or closed because it and you are redundant. There is no security in a globalized economy.

Both the world and Canada are at a crossroads. The world debt is now unsustainable. It will crash unless the banking system is really reformed. If you want to know more about that, you can buy my latest book, Stop: Think, or you can go to more seminars like you had this morning or you can do both.

The system would have crashed already if it hadn't been for the IMF using our money to lend to Third World countries to pay interest on what they already owe so it looks as though those loans are performing when, in fact, they are non-performing. They're a debt that can never be repaid.

I don't thing our government has leveled with us and told us, "We have used billions of your dollars to finance the international banks and to keep them solvent." Did they put that [message] in with your income tax when they sent it to you? I don't think so.

So we are the ones who are keeping the leaky ship afloat.

And what about Canada? Our last two governments have sold us into bondage for the proverbial 30 pieces of silver. They have hoodwinked us and lied to us. Nothing is sacred — our industries, our resources, our environment our culture nothing. Even as we speak, our government is putting our health care and education on the table in the next round of World Trade Organization negotiations.

Not even our money is sacrosanct. The selling job to persuade us to trade the loony for the U.S. dollar has already begun. Preposterous at first, it is now being considered inevitable by more and more naive Canadians who don't have a clue where money comes from or how the monetary system works. As Michel Chossudovsky pointed out, whoever controls the issue of money controls everything.

If we give up our monetary sovereignty, adopt the U.S. dollar, and accept a customs union, we are signing our own death knell as a country.

Monetary sovereignty and foreign domination was what the American War of Independence was all about. Canada now finds itself in a similar state of domination. And if we don't do something about it now, it will be too late.

The question is, and this, I guess, is what the conference is all about, the question is, are we ready to start our own war for independence through the ballot box, and abrogate — no half measures as somebody said — abrogate the Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA to free us from the oppressive national treatment clause? And to do it before we sign any other treaties that would lock us in for five or 10 years or forever?

There is no party in the House of Commons, as Michel pointed out, that is going to do it because they all accept globalization as the wave of the future. No wonder people are so fed up with government. We have a whole generation of young people who have never seen a good government and probably don't believe that one is possible. I think we owe it to them to prove it is possible.

Canada can compete in trade, but not in investment. When we signed the Free Trade Agreement, we sold our birthright and we set a frightening precedent. Only an about turn will save the world and save Canada because our futures are all wound up together. Only an about turn will save us from catastrophe.

So the problem is now for Canada and for the world — before those investment clauses are entrenched in the WTO and before the Free Trade Agreement for the Americas is signed. I don't care, frankly, what the Tory Party does in 10 years. And I don't care what the Liberal Party does in 10 years, or the Reform Party, if it still exists, or the NDP, or the Bloc.

I want to know if we are ready to start our own revolution and our own war for independence. But we need a vehicle. Popular movements don't abrogate treaties; governments abrogate treaties. Could the Canadian Action Party be that vehicle? Yes it could! Could the Canadian Action Party win the most seats of any party in the next election? Yes it could! All it would take is for the people who loved Canada enough to fight the MAI last year, to love it enough to fight to save it now. That's all it would take.

It's not a case of having enough people to start a party in the traditional sense. It's a case of having a vehicle to facilitate a revolution, and revolutions are spontaneous events. They develop with lightning speed. How could we get the word out and not have it censored by people like Conrad Black? Through the Internet — the same way it was done with the MAI.

So do we have the will to fight? Does our country really mean enough? Does it matter to us? If it does, let us light the flame that will restore the hope and passion in the hearts of Canadian patriots! Let us do whatever it takes to guarantee that our children and grandchildren will always be able to shout and to sing. "O Canada, we stand on guard for thee!"

Write Mr. Hellyer and the Canadian Action Party at Suite 302- 99 Atlantic Ave., Toronto, ON, M6K 3J8 or fax (416) 535-6325 or e mail [email protected]

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