Directors Statement

I started working on this film by accident. I had heard about the Security Prosperity Partnership (SPP) but it wasn’t the kind of issue I thought I was able, or interested in tackling as a filmmaker.  I was more interested in working on films about the positive things people were doing to improve society rather than poking around in the dark shadows to expose the nastiness of the Bush regime and the corporatocracy we live in.

I had approached the local chapter of the Council of Canadians for help with a kids film camp that I wanted to do in the summer of 2007 and they in turn asked me to help them in their effort to educate municipal leaders about the Trade Investment Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA) that Alberta and British Columbia had entered into.

I was traveling to Ontario to work on another film I was developing and decided to take a side trip to conduct interviews with Gordon Laxer (Parkland Institute), Maude Barlow (Council of Canadians), Erin Weir (Canadian Labour Council) and Teresa Healy (Canadian Labour Council) about TILMA and the SPP and how these agreements are related. I knew that the SPP was not a positive development for the citizens of North America but what I learned in these interview shocked me. The fact that most people knew nothing about the SPP process and that the mainstream media was completely ignoring it was also shocking. This became the motivating factor in my two year effort to expose this anti-democratic corporate agenda.

I decided that I should attend the protests against the SPP at the leaders summit in Montebello Quebec in August of 2007. I raised money by promising to include people’s names in the credits for contributions of $50 or more. I flew back to Ottawa and followed Maude Barlow and other opponents of the SPP to Montebello and documented the protest.

While I was in Montebello I captured footage of Dave Coles, the president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, confronting three masked men with rocks and bottles attempting to incite violence at the SPP protest. Dave called them out as police officers and this later proved to be correct. I posted the footage  on youtube and it became a national and international news story.

Later, I posted a second youtube video about this incident that highlights what laws these police officers broke to reinforce a call for a public inquiry into this incident. The video highlights physical attacks on the riot squad by these provocateurs including one undercover police officer hitting a riot squad member in the facemask and banging a rock into a riot shield. To date there has been no public inquiry and the Quebec Police Complaints Commission exonerated the police provocateurs and amazingly blamed Dave Coles for causing the trouble.

This blatant attack on citizens rights to peaceful protest spurred my on further and I produced a summary documentary in the fall of 2007 and released it on youtube. I thought that there was the possibility of a federal election and I wanted to do what I could to educate the Canadian public about the SPP.  I distributed 1300 free copies of this summary documentary on DVD and encouraged people to copy the DVD and distribute it themselves. I have updated this short film and included it on the DVD with the feature. It is perfect for showing at a meeting to help generate discussion about the issue.

During the process of working on this film I uploaded another fifteen videos about the SPP to the CanadiansNanaimo youtube channel. The feature length video is now available for purchase .

The SPP is officially dead!

According to the US Government website dedicated to the Security Prosperity Partnership http://www.spp.gov/ “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.”

We have a win, but that doesn’t mean that the struggle against the corporate agenda that spawned this process is over. Civil society in Canada, the United States and Mexico have effectively exposed the SPP and made it politically poisonous for politicians to embrace but we could easily end up with a new manifestation of this agenda with a new Orwellian title. The corporate elite and their political cronies are waiting for the next emergency or shock to further implement aspects of the SPP agenda. There is a lot of speculation that the much-hyped H1N1 flu pandemic will be used to further curtail the freedom of citizens and advance the security component of the agenda formerly known as the SPP.

There have been predictions of the death of the SPP for more than a year and calls for a name change and a division of this grand agenda into separate components.   In the March 4^th edition of Embassy Magazine, Thomas d’Aquino, head of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, said something else will inevitably replace the controversial forum. “Why it will be replaced is because the energy, environment, trade, financial regulation, and agriculture, all these things that we do in the form of millions of cross-border transactions everyday are going to have to be coordinated.”

The Fraser Institute has recommended that the SPP be rebranded as the North American Standards and Regulatory Area. The corporate interests that promoted the SPP are not going to give up and go away – we have a lot of work to do to combat this agenda.

Even though the SPP is officially finished, this film ‘You, Me and the SPP: Trading Democracy for Corporate Rule’ provides an excellent background to this agenda and helps to expose how quickly and easily the corporate elite and their political cronies will abandon democratic principles to consolidate their own power, control and authority at the expense of citizens rights.

I’m working on booking a national tour of this film to continue the work of educating the public about this corporate agenda and work towards strengthening civil society.  If we are going to avoid future versions of the SPP then we need to change the social, political and economic structure of our society to become more inclusive, transparent and democratic.

I hope to see you while I’m on tour.

In Solidarity

Paul Manly