![James Laxer](http://rabble.ca/sites/rabble/files/imagecache/thumbnail/category_pictures/picture-62_0.jpg "James Laxer is regularly asked to comment on current national and global issues by the Canadian media and frequently writes columns in major newspapers and periodicals.
In 1969, he was one of the founders of the Waffle Group, Canada’s largest New Left political movement. In 1971, at the age of 29, he ran second for the national leadership of the New Democratic Party. In the mid 1970s, James Laxer was a leading crusader against the power of multi national petroleum companies. His books, speeches and television appearances helped lead to the creation of a nationally owned oil company, Petro Canada, established to counter the power of companies like Exxon in Canada.
In 1981, Laxer was appointed research director of the federal New Democratic Party. At the end of his two year term, he wrote a controversial, book length critique of the party’s economic policies, charging that they were seriously dated. The report was front page news in Canada and was debated for months in the national media.
In 1984, the National Film Board of Canada hired Laxer to be host narrator, for a series of documentaries on the changing global economy and Canada’s place in it. In preparing the series, Laxer travelled extensively in Japan, Europe and the United States. The series, entitled Reckoning, was denied broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation because it was seen as too controversial.
Instead it was broadcast by a hook up of all the English language educational networks in the country. The series was also broadcast in the United States, as well, by a large number of PBS stations. The Reckoning series has won awards in both the United States and Canada. One of its films won the blue ribbon, first prize, at the prestigious American Film and Video Festival, for best political documentary. The same film won the Atlantic
Film Festival and national Gemini Awards in Canada for best writing in an information series, awards which went to Laxer and the film’s director as co-authors.
In 1986-87, Laxer spent a year in Europe writing Decline of the Superpowers. From 1978 to 1981, he hosted a public affairs television program on TV Ontario. He regularly went to Europe to conduct interviews with leading European political and intellectual figures. In 1993 his book False God: How the Globalization Myth Has Impoverished Canada, was published by Lester Publishing. In Search of a New Left: Canadian Politics
After the Neo-Conservative Assault was published by Viking in 1996. The Undeclared War: Class Conflict in the Age of Cyber Capitalism, was published by Viking in 1998, and by Penguin Canada in 1999, in a paperback edition. Dalton Camp wrote that the Undeclared War "is an informed and cogent book on the great and growing dilemma of our time: how to preserve a free society in the face of increasing disparity and the creation of a new class society---‘a dominant class and a dominated class.’ This is stuff we need to know." Laxer’s book, Stalking the Elephant: My Discovery of America was on national best seller lists for seven weeks in the autumn of 2000. In his review of the book for the Globe and Mail, David Shribman, Pulitzer prize winning columnist for the Boston Globe, commented: "This is a book by a Canadian that can change the United States." Stalking the Elephant is to be published by The New Press in New York in September 2001. In 2003, his book, The Border: Canada, the U.S. and Dispatches from the 49th Parallel, was published by Doubleday Canada. In 2004, Douglas and McIntyre published his book Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism. This memoir of James Laxer’s childhood was the winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award for best biography/memoir in 2005.
James Laxer is a Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto")
In the middle of a period of prorogation, when Parliament is not sitting, the Harper government has sprung a sweeping new trade deal on Canadians. The agreement the Harper government has reached with the Obama administration is the most important extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) since that deal went into effect in 1994.
The Harper deal will allow Canadian companies to bid on many, but not all, of the contracts involving government funded economic stimulus projects in the U.S., which are restricted to U.S. companies under Buy American provisions that have been inserted into the U.S. government's Recovery Act.
In return for this "concession" from Washington, Ottawa has agreed to pay an unacceptably high price. Under the deal, Canadian provinces and municipalities will permanently give up the right to favour local companies in awarding contracts. Government procurement at the municipal and provincial levels is an extremely important economic development tool, crucial for job creation, the encouragement of Canadian firms and the development of home-grown technology. At a time when cities are rebuilding their transit systems and are refitting homes to make them more energy efficient, it is the height of folly to open all these contracts to American bidders. (Given the multiplicity of measures used to protect them from outside bidders, it is foolish to imagine that Canadian firms will have an equal opportunity to bid on U.S. state and municipal contracts.)
What makes the Harper government's deal particularly maddening is that the Buy American provisions in the U.S. Recovery Act violate the spirit if not the terms of NAFTA that guarantee the right of Canadian firms to bid on U.S. federal government projects with the exception of defence contracts. Instead of publicly and loudly asserting that Washington is violating NAFTA, the Harper government is bribing the Obama administration to stop doing that by opening up tens of billions of dollars worth of public contracts in Canada to American corporations.
Moreover, out of the total of $275 billion in infrastructure contracts to be awarded under the U.S. Recovery Act, $200 billion worth have already been signed. The rash deal Harper has made will open up only the last contracts to be awarded to Canadian firms, and at best, a small proportion of those. On top of that, the Obama administration has shifted gears toward fiscal restraint and plans to reign in further stimulus spending.
The Harper government is getting Canadian companies in on the tail end of a U.S. program in return for giving away a very important part of Canada's ability to nurture Canadian firms and research and development at the provincial and municipal levels. This is an assault on what remains of Canadian economic sovereignty.
It is well known that the Harper government has been negotiating this deal with Washington since last September. Now the government has sprung it on the country when parliament is not sitting.
Expanding NAFTA, as this deal does, requires an open and wide-ranging national debate, both inside parliament and outside. A trade deal of this magnitude should only enter into force following a vote in parliament. (Debates are needed as well in provincial legislatures. Provincial governments should also not be permitted to agree to the deal without debate.)
In the national conversation that must begin, Canadians should examine where the global economy is headed in coming decades and how Canada's economy can best fit into it so as to create the jobs and opportunities Canadians need. It should now be abundantly clear, as a consequence of the economic crisis through which we are passing that the United States is ensnared in a long-term struggle to cope with its international indebtedness and the indebtedness of its citizens. Whether American policy makers do a good or a poor job coping with the vast problems they face, the U.S. role in the global economy is diminishing and is bound to diminish further.
Canadians need to ask themselves whether this is the moment to put all our eggs in the American basket for the future.
The experience of the Buy American provisions in the Recovery Act ought to teach us something. Whenever the United States needs, in the pursuit of its own interests, to violate trade deals with Canada, it does so. It has done this for years on softwood lumber and now on the operations of the U.S. Recovery Act. Let's now be fooled again.
Finally, it's time for us to face up to the implications of allowing a secretive government to foreclose our options without us having a say in the matter.
This post appeared in the online edition of the Toronto Star.
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Canadians will get a national debate when they stand up and demand one, when they decide they would rather live in a democracy than a pluticracy. There aren't many hopeful signs of this happening anytime soon.
When did we ever have a "say in the matter"?
Canada doesn't have "national debates". We let our politicians debate for us, and then the government goes ahead and does whatever it likes.
Harper is not about to back off from a trade deal because of speeches made in Parliament, and the opposition is not about to defeat the government on a vote on the issue.