Energy workers respond to SPP Energy Agenda
September 11, 2007
On August 18, 2007 energy workers from Mexico, the United States, Canada and Quebec together with the Four North American networks fighting NAFTA and the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) met in Montreal. The participating organizations were meeting at the time of the Montebello SPP summit that links Canada, Mexico and the US in a new political and economic framework for continental integration based on the security agenda of the George Bush presidency. This SPP agenda has the complicity of President Calderon and Prime Minister Harper, but has no democratic mandate from the people of those three countries.
Energy unions and worker organizations share the concerns of popular sector movements that the SPP is a new and powerful instrument created by government and corporate elites to shape the destinies of our nations without democratic participation or oversight. We reject the security agenda of the SPP which links NAFTA and trade to the limiting of civil liberties, mass surveillance, racial profiling and the failed and disastrous military and foreign policies of George W. Bush. We challenge the neo-liberal assumptions of prosperity which have led to increasing disparities of wealth and power in each of our countries.
However, as energy workers we are compelled first of all to respond to the SPP energy agenda.
