NAFTA Superhighway: The Debate Continues…

(The Ottawa Citizen — Don Butler • Video: CNN)

Are North American governments secretly conspiring to build a “NAFTA superhighway,” four football fields wide, from Mexico to Canada to bypass regulatory controls and whisk goods swiftly to market?

If you believe some right-wing websites in the United States, it’s all but a fait accompli. They insist a gargantuan project is in the works that will carve a 365-metre-wide swath through the continent’s heart, with 10traffic lanes, rail lines for freight and passenger trains, fibre-optic cable lines and pipelines carrying oil, gas and water.

Conservative commentators Pat Buchanan and Phyllis Schlafly and websites such as WorldNetDaily link the supposed superhighway to the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), a series of agreements being negotiated among the United States, Canada and Mexico. They fear the SPP will lead to a North American union similar to the European Union, with a resulting loss of American sovereignty.

If you’ve never heard of the NAFTA superhighway, it may be because no such plan actually exists. The whole idea, one American official recently told a congressional committee, is an “urban myth.”

But some remain unconvinced, in part because the largely secretive SPP process has created an information void that provides oxygen for conspiracy theorists.

Most SPP work is being done by 19 working groups that meet behind closed doors. The project surfaces publicly only when politicians from the three countries gather for periodic updates, like yesterday’s SPP ministerial meetings in Ottawa.So far, anxiety about the purported NAFTA Superhighway has been confined to the United States. Activists in Canada, by and large, don’t quite know what to make of it, although the Sierra Club has expressed concern that NAFTA super-corridors could be used to pipe Canadian water to American markets. Read the complete article.