Well this is it, I’m hitting the road with my film about the Security and Prosperity Partnership ‘You, Me and the SPP: Trading Democracy for Corporate Rule’ with a tour launch on Parliament Hill on October 1^st. I’ll be visiting 32 cities between Saint John’s Newfoundland and Victoria BC and every screening with the exception of Fifth Avenue Cinema in Vancouver is either free or by donation.

A special thanks goes out to all the tour sponsors and hosts for making this a reality.

You can see all the tour dates at http://www.youmespp.com/screenings/ each screening date has downloadable posters, handbills and press releases that you can use to help promote the screening in you local community. Please pass this information along to your friends across Canada. If you’re in Ottawa on October 1^st please try to attend the tour launch on Parliament Hill. If you live elsewhere you can watch the launch live on rabble.ca at http://rabble.ca/rabbletv/youmeandthespp and then attend a local screening when the tour comes to your town.

You might be asking why I would bother to go to the trouble of traveling across the country in the age of the Internet, global warming (and perhaps a flu pandemic). Watching videos on youtube and reading emails can be informative but it leads to a sense of isolation. Community is about coming together, discussing issues face to face and working on solutions to overcome them. I have asked the hosts of the screenings across the country to invite local organizations to attend the screenings, bring information, petitions, sign up sheets and to speak at the Q & A’s after the screening about how the corporate SPP agenda is manifesting itself locally and what people can do to oppose it.

In my last email I called this a National SPP Victory Tour. While the US government has pronounced that the SPP is no longer an active initiative, this victory will not be complete unless we capitalize on this momentum, take the initiative and push for a people’s agenda. The architects in the organization that spawned the SPP, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) are not going to give up and slink back to their executive suites in their corporate towers and sulk.

The CCCE brings together the CEO’s of 150 of Canada’s most powerful business empires, representing $4.5 trillion in assets and more than $850 billion in annual revenues (three times the national budget). The CCCE and its predecessor the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI) are the most powerful and successful special interest, lobby group in Canadian history. They have been pushing their agenda forward for 30 years and they are not going to let a little setback with the SPP slow them down. They will continue to push the Canadian government to regulate and legislate in their favour, to increase their profit margins at the expense of workers, consumers and the environment.  Why? So corporate CEO’s can earn tens of millions in bonuses while we all watch our standard of living drop – enough is enough!

A great deal of the SPP agenda has already been implemented or is still moving forward. What about all of the security measures brought in as part of this agenda? I haven’t seen any announcements about rolling back the deeper integration of the Canadian and US military so I would assume that the Feb. 2008 agreement to allow troops from each neighbouring country to cross the border in cases of pandemic, civil unrest or natural disaster still holds. How about the open sharing of data on citizens by the RCMP and CSIS with their counterparts in the USA? Has Canada dropped the no-fly-list and other adopted aspects of the US Patriot Act?

The deep integration of the North American energy system is also moving ahead. Whether it’s run of the river for hydro exports from BC, new hydro projects in Manitoba, proposed nuclear power plants to power the tar sands in Saskatchewan, the export of raw bitumen from the tar sands directly to the USA, the construction of liquid natural gas storage tanks on the Pacific and Atlantic coast or the fact that almost all of the oil and gas pipelines flow south rather than across Canada, the energy integration agenda is about US energy security not Canadian energy security. This aspect of the SPP has not changed either.

The North American Super Corridor Coalition (NASCO) just held their fifth annual conference in Quebec in June. This coincided with a summit of premiers and state governors about strengthening North American cooperation. Check these websites http://www.mri.gouv.qc.ca/en/_scripts/Actualites/ViewNew.asp?NewID=6647&lang=en and http://www.nascoquebec2009.com/eng/index.html It may not be the interplanetary super corridor that Stephen Harper was musing about but NASCO’s plans look like a NAFTA super corridor to me.

It’s time for the citizens of this country to organize, push back and demand a society that is fair and equitable for all.  That is why I am going on tour. To help spread information but also to share ideas and solutions, so we can get together and talk about what needs to be done instead of sitting at home, wringing our hands and worrying. We are the people. It’s our country and our democracy. Canada does not belong to a small group of elite businessmen and political leaders. We have the power we just need to start exercising it.

Please help to spread the word. I hope to see you on tour.

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