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Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America

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Security and Prosperity Partnership
of North America
Location map:
Map of NAFTA
Member countries:
 Canada
 Mexico
 United States

The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) was a supra-national level dialogue with the stated purpose of providing greater cooperation on security and economic issues. The Partnership was founded in Waco, Texas, on March 23, 2005, by Prime Minister of Canada Paul Martin, President of Mexico Vicente Fox, and U.S. President George W. Bush.[1] It was the second of such regional-level initiatives involving the United States following the 1997 Partnership for Prosperity and Security in the Caribbean (PPS).

Since August 2009, the SPP is no longer active. It has been largely superseded by the annual North American Leaders' Summit, an event that was established as part of the SPP.

Organization

The SPP was neither a treaty nor a trade agreement.[1]

The initial SPP Working Groups were the Manufactured Goods and Sectoral and Regional Competitiveness Working Group, E-Commerce & ICT Working Group, Energy Working Group, Transportation Working Group, Food & Agriculture Working Group, Environment Working Group, Financial Services Working Group, Business Facilitation Working Group, Movement of Goods Working Group, and Health Working Group.[2] The Transportation Working Group was formed to analyze border trade and traffic flows.[1] The U.S. Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) led the SPP Health Working Group, in order to improve the ability of three countries to mutually assist each other during public health emergencies, to exchange information for policy planning, and to improve product safety.[3]

Goals

The stated goals of the SPP were cooperation and information sharing, improving productivity, reducing the costs of trade, enhancing the joint stewardship of the environment, facilitating agricultural trade while creating a safer and more reliable food supply, and protecting people from disease.[1]

Announced funding

On 26 February 2008, Canada's Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty, announced his government's 2008 budget, which included "$29 million over two years to meet priorities under the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America".[4]

North American Competitiveness Council

The North American Competitiveness Council (NACC) was an additional SPP working group. It was created later, at the second summit of the SPP in Cancún, Quintana Roo, Mexico, in March 2006. Composed of 30 corporate representatives from some of North America's largest companies, the North American Competitiveness Council was mandated to set priorities for the SPP and to act as a stable driver of policy implementation between the three countries.

Trilateral summit meetings

Main article: North American Leaders' Summit
The 2006 meeting of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America.

As part of SPP, an annual trilateral summit was held between the leaders of the three countries. Following the cancellation of the SPP in 2009, meetings continued as the North American Leaders' Summit.

A video of the Waco SPP Trilateral Summit News Conference is available online.[5]
Meeting between Mexican President Fox, Canadian Prime Minister Harper, and U.S. President Bush. A U.S. White House press release regarding the Cancun SPP Trilateral Summit is available online.[6]
The United States, Canada, and Mexico had a major trilateral summit meeting regarding SPP at the Château Montebello in Montebello, Quebec.[7] This conference was described as a public relations event with the purpose of promoting the SPP among investors and to reassure the public about the initiative.[8] The summit was also noteworthy because a short five minute video uploaded to YouTube led to the eventual police admission of the use of undercover officers disguised as protesters at the summit.[9] Critics charged that the undercover officers were agents provocateurs sent to disrupt the protest by inciting violence: "This circumstance is unique because it was among the very first occurrences in Canada where user-generated footage uploaded to video-sharing site YouTube elicited an official police response offered in defence of police tactics".[9]
In his 2008 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush announced that a summit on the SPP would be held from April 21–22, 2008, in New Orleans, Louisiana. According to the White House, the summit focused on improving the SPP initiatives and on discussing "hemispheric and global issues of importance to North America".[10]

Criticism

In 2006, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs argued that the SPP was part of a plan to merge the United States, Canada, and Mexico into a North American Union similar to the European Union.[11] At the time, Dobbs claimed that U.S. President Bush, who left office on January 20, 2009, was to have bypassed Congress and ultimately create a union based on a Texas highway corridor.[12]

The Council of Canadians claimed that the SPP extended the controversial "no fly list" of the United States, made Canadian water a communal resource, and forced Canada and Mexico to adopt the United States' security policies—one of which would allow foreign military forces to neglect sovereignty in the case of a "civil emergency". It also touched on the issue of Albertan tar sands expansion to five times its current size.[13]

On May 10, 2007, Conservative MP Leon Benoit, chair of the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade, prevented University of Alberta professor Gordon Laxer from testifying that SPP would leave Canadians "to freeze in the dark" because "Canada itself—unlike most industrialized nations—has no national plan or reserves to protect its own supplies" by saying Laxer's testimony was irrelevant, defying a majority vote to overrule his motion, shutting down the committee meeting, and leaving with the other three out of four Conservative members; the meeting later continued, presided over by the Liberal vice-chair.[14] After these disruptions, the National Post reported on a Conservative party manual to, among other things, usurp Parliamentary committees and cause chaos in unfavourable committees.[15][16] The New Democratic Party (NDP) also criticized SPP for being undemocratic, not open to Parliament, and opaque.[17] NDP leader Jack Layton described the process as not simply unconstitutional, but "non-constitutional", held completely outside the usual mechanisms of oversight.[18]

Approximately thirty U.S.-based organizations also sent an open letter to Congress on April 21, 2008, criticizing the secrecy and lack of any sort of democratic oversight:

"What differentiates the SPP from other security and trade agreements is that it is not subject to Congressional oversight or approval. The SPP establishes a corporate/government bureaucracy for implementation that excludes civil society participation. ... Facing a worrisome pact pushed forward in secrecy, it is time for Congress to halt this undemocratic approach and establish a process based on openness, accountability, and the participation of civil society.[19]

Cancellation

In August 2009, the SPP website was updated to say: "The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) is no longer an active initiative. There will not be any updates to this site".[20] Subsequent to this the website link does not connect and the cache website links do not work.

The NDP called this a "victory" which is "the result of the active and sustained efforts across the country, and across North America, of Canadian, Mexican, and American activists from the labour movement, civil society, progressive legislators and all those concerned and committed to build a better quality of life in our Canada and throughout North America".[21]

Renewed discussions

On February 4, 2011, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and U.S. President Barack Obama announced a new security and prosperity initiative with plans to "pursue a perimeter approach to security in ways that support economic competitiveness, job creation, and prosperity".[22]

On March 13, 2011, the Canadian government announced it was beginning a five-week consultation process "with all levels of government and with communities, non-governmental organizations and the private sector, as well as with our citizens on the implementation of the shared vision for perimeter security and economic competitiveness".[23]

See also

Related infrastructure projects:

References

  1. ^ a b c d M. Angeles Villarreal; Jennifer E. Lake (2009). "Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America" (PDF). fas.org. Congressional Research Service. Retrieved 15 September 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  2. ^ SPP: Prosperity Working Groups Archived 2007-02-19 at the Wayback Machine
  3. ^ "Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America". www.phe.gov. 7 May 2012. Retrieved 15 September 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  4. ^ "Budget 2008 - Budget in Brief" (Press release). Ministry of Finance. 2008-02-26. Archived from the original on 2008-03-01. Retrieved 2008-02-27.
  5. ^ Trilateral Summit News Conference Archived 2007-02-02 at the Wayback Machine
  6. ^ President Bush Meets with President Fox in Cancun, Mexico
  7. ^ Campion-Smith, Bruce. "Closed-door talks rile protesters," The Star (Toronto). August 17, 2007.
  8. ^ Showdown Montebello! People versus the SPP[permanent dead link]
  9. ^ a b Schneider, C.J. (2015). Police Image Work in an Era of Social Media: YouTube and the 2007 Montebello Summit Protest. In Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs, editors, Social Media, Politics and the State: Protests, Revolutions, Riots, Crime and Policing in an Age of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, Routledge: 227-246
  10. ^ "President Bush to Host North American Leaders' Summit" (Press release). Office of the Press Secretary. 2008-01-31. Retrieved 2008-02-22.
  11. ^ "North American Union?". CNN. 2006-06-21. Retrieved 2008-02-27.
  12. ^ "CorridorWatch.org - Challenging the Wisdom of the Trans-Texas Corridor". Archived from the original on 2010-01-17.
  13. ^ Behind Closed Doors: What they're not telling us about the Security and Prosperity PartnershipArchived 2011-01-01 at the Wayback Machine
  14. ^ Patterson, Kelly (2007-05-11). "Tory chair storms out of SPP hearing". The Ottawa Citizen. Archived from the original on 2007-07-16. Retrieved 2007-08-03.
  15. ^ Martin, Don (2007-05-18). "Tories have the book on political wrangling". National Post. Archived from the original on 2007-10-14. Retrieved 2007-08-03.
  16. ^ "Tories blasted for handbook on paralyzing Parliament". Canadian Press. CTV. 2007-05-18. Retrieved 2007-08-03.
  17. ^ "US Congress demands transparency in SPP agenda - Canadians also deserve to know what Americans will know about continental integration plan: NDP MP Peter Julian". NDP. 2007-07-26. Archived from the original on 2007-08-16. Retrieved 2007-08-03.
  18. ^ Sara Falconer (2007-08-16). "Popping the lid off the SPP". Hour Magazine. Archived from the original on 2007-09-08.
  19. ^ Open letter to the U.S. Congress, April 21, 2008. Archived January 1, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
  20. ^ "The SPP is dead. Let's keep it that way". rabble.ca. Retrieved 2016-11-07.
  21. ^ "Canada's NDP". Canada's NDP. Archived from the original on 2012-08-05. Retrieved 2016-11-07.
  22. ^ Government of Canada, Department of Finance. "Budget 2016". actionplan.gc.ca. Retrieved 2016-11-07.
  23. ^ "International Trade Minister Van Loan and Minister of State Lebel Launch Public Consultation on Shared Vision for Canada-U.S. Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness". GAC. 19 June 2013. Retrieved 2016-11-07.
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