[mobglob-discuss] Picket Home Depot- Oppose the SPP!

[Harsha Walia]

Home Depot Supports the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North
America! What do YOU think about that?

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PICKET HOME DEPOT
SUNDAY JULY 1
10:30 - noon
@ 900 Terminal Avenue (corner Main)
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*** EVEN IF YOU CAN'T MAKE THE INFORMATIONAL PICKET:

==> Contact Home Depot and tell them you oppose Home Depot’s participation
in the NACC as advisors to the SPP. Advise them that you are considering/
will not be shopping at Home Depot unless they publicly announce that they
will not participate in the NACC.

1) Talk to a Home Depot Supervisor at 1(800) 628-0525
2) Send a letter directly to Annette Verschuren, President, Home Depot
Canada, 426 Ellesmere Road, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, M1R 4E7. To
contact her directly, call 416-609-0852 and follow the prompts to get to
her office.

==> Tell your friends and family about the SPP.

==> Contact us to find out more information or to get involved:
noii-van at resist.ca or call 778-552-2099

Home Depot is a member of the Harper-appointed, CEO-group North American
Competitiveness Council (NACC), the only advisory group to the Security
and Prosperity Partnership Agreement of North America. The SPP is a
NAFTA-plus-Homeland-Security model that has been negotiated in complete
secrecy by Harper, Bush, and Calderon and their corporate supporters. A
September 13, 2006 story in Maclean's magazine describes NACC as a
“cherrypicked group of executives who were whisked to Cancun in March by
the leaders of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, and asked to come up with a
plan for taking North American integration beyond NAFTA.” The writer
quotes Annette Verschuren, president of Home Depot Canada, who called the
Cancun meeting “a lot of fun [because] there were no reporters.”

*** BACKGROUND ON THE SPP ***

The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) was founded
in March 2005, in Cancun, at a summit of the Heads of State of Canada, the
US, and Mexico.

Broken down, the SPP is a NAFTA-plus-Homeland-Security model. The founding
premise of the SPP is that an agenda of economic free trade and national
security will result in human prosperity. Yet we know that the so-called
“prosperity” of previous free trade agreements such as NAFTA have only
brought corporate prosperity, with increasing rates of poverty and
displacement for the vast majority of people. For example, despite
government rhetoric, the Economist Intelligence Unit (affiliated with The
Economist) has reported that the implementation of NAFTA in Mexico has
“failed to create even one formal job in net terms.” We also know that the
“War on Terror” and the beefed-up national security apparatus has
exacerbated insecurity and brought terror on the lives of millions of
people locally and globally through immigrant raids, border
militarization, foreign troop occupations, and repression of civil
liberties and resistance movements. A September 2006 report in The
Independent found that the “War on Terror” has “directly killed a minimum
of 62,006 people, created 4.5 million refugees, and cost the US more than
the sum needed to pay off the debts of every poor nation on earth.”

SPP is not an official treaty; it is not an official law; rather, it is
being presented as a vague ‘diaologue based on shared values’. Therefore
it has been able to escape any public scrutiny and will never be debated
in the House of Commons. There have been several meetings for the SPP,
including a summit in March 2006 in Texas and a preparatory meeting in
Ottawa in February 2007, all of which were held behind close doors. On
August 21st 2007, the three Heads of State will meet for a third
tri-national Summit to forward the SPP agreements in Montebello, Quebec.
People in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Quebec City have already begun
organizing to confront this Summit in Montebello, to confront the agenda
of SPP and the agenda of George W Bush, Stephan Harper, and Felipe
Calderon.

No One is Illegal Vancouver joins the calls to organize against SPP to
demonstrate our indignation and resistance to this next attack on the
interests of the people by those who think they are masters of our lives
and destiny. We know that the real face of SPP is to further an agenda of
corporate free trade, border militarization, criminalization of migration,
privatization and theft of indigenous land and resources, repression in
the name of national security, impoverishment and displacement, and
cooperation in war and occupation. We will be launching a campaign to
oppose the SPP and invite all those in resistance to the SPP to build a
diverse movement to actively participate and coordinate actions, events,
disruptions, teach-ins, creative resistance, and more as part of these
continental days of action.

SPP is a direct continuation of the colonialist and capitalist politics
that perpetuate and accelerate the carnage, pillage, and destruction of
the planet. Laura Carlsen of the International Relations Centre Americas
Program explains, “SPP has three fundamental objectives. The Bush
administration wants to create more advantageous conditions for
transnational corporations and remove remaining barriers to the flow of
capital and crossborder production within the framework of NAFTA. It wants
to secure access to natural resources, especially oil. And it wants to
create a regional security plan based on “pushing its borders out” into a
security perimeter that includes Mexico and Canada.”

Under this framework of security and prosperity, the following initiatives
are currently being recommended and/or being undertaken:
§        Integration of military and police training exercises,
cooperation on
law enforcement, and the expansion of The North American Aerospace Defense
Command (NORAD) into a into a multiservice joint naval and land Defense
Command.
§        Expand temporary worker programs as a means of ensuring low wages
and
labour exploitation.
§        Adoption of coordinated border surveillance technologies with major
contracts provided to military suppliers; coordination of no-fly lists;
development of a North American Border Pass; and the use of Biometrics.
The Canadian Biometrics Group is predicting that the North American
biometric “market” would rise to US $2.6-billion by 2006.
§        Integration of refugee policies. The Safe Third Country Agreement,
implemented in December 2004 between the US and Canada, has resulted in at
least a 40% decrease in refugee applications in Canada. Under the United
States-Mexico “Voluntary Repatriation Program” more than 35,000 persons
have already been deported.There is also a pilot project to share
information on refugee and asylum claimants based on a comparison of
fingerprint records.
§        Harmonization of health and environmental regulations to lower
standards
and development of a North American alternative to the Kyoto Protocol.
§        Beginning of the privatization of Mexico’s nationalized oil sector;
fivefold increase in tar sands production in Alberta; and full
“development” of Canadian energy resources, already being actively opposed
by the Lubicon, Dene, and other indigenous communities.
§        NAFTA Superhighway, a corridor several hundred metres wide including
rail lines, freeways and pipelines from Mexico to the Canadian border.

In Canada, the major lobby for SPP comes from the Canadian Council of
Chief Executives (CCCE), a CEO organization and Canada’s ‘premier business
organization’. In January 2003, CCCE launched its North American Security
and Prosperity Initiative with initiatives to increase investment and
capital flows, integrate security agreements and military defence, and
expedited means of resource (oil, natural gas, water, forest products)
extraction. With the launch of SPP in 2005, the North American
Competitiveness Council (NACC) was created. Harper appointed the Canadian
membership of the NACC in June 2006: Dominic D’Alessandro (Manulife
Financial); Paul Desmarais, Jr. (Power Corporation of Canada); David
Ganong (Ganong Bros. Limited); Richard George (Suncor Energy Inc.); Hunter
Harrison (CN); Linda Hasenfratz (Linamar Corporation); Michael Sabia (Bell
Canada Enterprises); Jim Shepherd (Canfor Corporation); Annette Verschuren
(The Home Depot); and Rick Waugh (Scotiabank).

Join us in rejecting the SPP! SPP= three governments Securing corporate
Profits and Prosperity for the rich!