“This weekend will be the beginning, the catalyst of a movement,” said Garry Leech, a Cape Breton journalist, professor and member of the Atlantic Regional Solidarity Network. Given what happened last weekend in Saint John, New Brunswick, it would be difficult to disagree.

Last weekend, hundreds of citizens representing grassroots and labour organizations held three days of protests and workshops in Saint John against a new proposed free-trade corridor, euphemistically titled “Atlantica.” These demonstrations garnered national television and radio coverage on Friday, after a group of 35 young-ish demonstrators managed to make their way past security at a conference entitled “Reaching Atlantica: Business Without Borders” just as Kenneth Irving, CEO of the Maritime oil and gas giant Irving Oil, was beginning his keynote address. Three protesters were arrested as police pushed the small crowd back outside the Conference Centre, amid chants of “Irving Oil, Irving Oil, how many unions will you spoil.”

A march from a hockey rink to the ritzy Saint John Trade and Convention centre drew 400 last Saturday, while a panel discussion entitled “Resisting Atlantica” featuring Maude Barlow, national chair of the Council of Canadians, packed a hotel ballroom with 500 people last Thursday.

J.D. Irving, one of the key sponsors of the conference, is head of Atlantic Canada’s biggest corporation, and owns a number of businesses in the areas of transportation, food services, forestry, oil and gas, construction and retail. For its part, the Telegraph-Journal, a local Irving-owned paper, was loaded with less-than-objective screeds against the “Atlantica Angst,” while wondering what “The Left” was “so riled up about.”

The proposed Atlantica International Trade and Economic Region (AINER) would link the Atlantic Provinces of Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick together with Eastern Quebec and the New England states of New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine and upstate New York. Although proponents of this initiative argue that Atlantica is simply an initiative aimed at creating better highways, railways and entry ports between these regions, the Atlantica website advocates for an “integrated perimeter security, the harmonization of external tariffs, and mutually agreeable standards for entry of persons from third countries.”

According to Maude Barlow, the Atlantica initiative is part of a broader strategy. She points to the March 2005 Security and Prosperity Partnership agreement signed between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico as an indicator that Atlantica’s implications may be more far-reaching than its proponents let on.

“The big idea was for Canada to offer up all sorts of things to keep the border open [after 9/11],” said Barlow. “The big idea encompassed a North American bloc, which would be a security bloc, a military bloc, a trade bloc, so we would negotiate as one bloc at the WTO.”

Barlow, whose recent book Too Close for Comfort: Canada’s Future Within Fortress North America deals with this very subject, believes that the implication of the Security and Prosperity Partnership is for the establishment of so-called “smart regulations” between the U.S. and Canada, which would effectively harmonize Canadian social, immigration, security, military, environmental, energy and foreign policy.

“So when I look at Atlantica, I look that it as the Atlantic regional prototype of this project,” she says.

David Legere, President of CUPE New Brunswick, concurs with Barlow. Legere noted that the issue of stagnation of wages in New England was viewed as a positive development inside the “Reaching Atlantica” conference.

“That reinforces our fear that the harmonization of regulations isn’t a harmonization up, it’s a harmonization down for worker wages and benefits,” he said.

Atlantica’s website has done little to dispel such fears. In its section on “Public Policy Distress Factors,” the website lists minimum wage legislation, size of public employee workforce and “union density” as barriers to “Labour Market Flexibility” and “Public Sector Efficiency.” The website also praises the public policies pursued by Ontario and Alberta, whose governments are Canada’s most socially conservative and corporate-friendly provinces

“Every one of these policies, size of government, level of tax burden, size of public service, union density — all of these things involve trade-offs, there are costs and benefits,” says Brian Lee Crowley, the director of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, a Halifax-based business-friendly think-tank, and one of the key proponents of Atlantica.

“What are the costs and what are the benefits of what we do versus what other somebody else does? It’s up to us to decide whether the trade-off we’ve made is the right one,” he added.

Yet some of the trade-offs of Atlantica are already readily apparent to Dave Thompson, a member of Friends of Rockwood Park.

“They’ve already started an Atlantica Centre for energy in Saint John; it’s been going for a year,” says Thompson.

“The first thing that they’ve done, they’ve made an attack on our city and our large nature park, Rockwood Park, by proposing to put a natural gas pipeline for export to the United States right through the park, and through nine neighborhoods in the city.”

The pipeline is being constructed by LNG, whose parent company is Irving Oil.

Friends of Rockwood Park is one of several grassroots environmental, aboriginal, social justice, anti-poverty and international solidarity organizations that have joined together with labour unions in Atlantic Canada to resist the Atlantica proposal. This coalition of organizations came together in less than two months, according to Tracy Glynn of the Fredericton Social Network.

“I think we’ve put it on the radar too. I heard people talking about it yesterday who had never even heard of Atlantica, and now it’s on the front page of the papers and the media.”

Despite this perhaps unwanted attention, delegates to the conference, including the Atlantic Provinces Chamber of Commerce pledged to pursue a lobby effort to bring Atlantic Canadian political leaders on board with the Atlantica proposals. Protest organizers insist that they will continue to mobilize against Atlantica, a project they say is solely aimed at enriching a small section of business élites in New England and Atlantic Canada.