PERSPECTIVE ON FREE TRADE : For the Down Side, Look North : Canada, the first U.S. partner, has already lost national rights--not to mention jobs--to transnational interests.

Within weeks or even days, the United States, Mexico and Canada will sign a draft free-trade agreement that will have enormous impact on the economic and social future of all three countries. This deal represents the second stage in a process to integrate the entire hemisphere into one economic free-trade zone, the first being the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement signed in 1989, the third to come as the other countries of the Americas quickly sign on, one by one.

The issue of the North American free-trade agreement is just now beginning to garner public attention in areas of the United States beyond the Mexican border. It is becoming clear that many blue-ribbon companies are seeking to benefit from the low wages and nonexistent environmental controls in Mexico, and Americans are concerned about how this will affect their lives.

To find out, they need only look north.

While the free-trade deal between our two countries went largely unnoticed in the United States, it sparked the most momentous debate in Canada about our future since World War II. Free trade was the sole issue of our 1988 federal election and will likely be the major issue of the next.

The effects of free trade on Canada have been devastating. This is because, unlike the European Community, which has established social, labor and environmental standards, the goal of free trade in North America is to deregulate all areas of government jurisdiction and give to the marketplace the power to determine standards. Under North American free trade, regulations designed to protect these sectors can be challenged as unfair practices and eliminated. Canada is being forced to give up every government practice that has fostered our economic independence, and to harmonize our standards downward.

Canada has had the highest labor and social standards on the continent. We have universal health care, old-age security, unemployment insurance and a family allowance. The richer parts of our country must, under our constitution, share their wealth with the poorer. We have invested in publicly run transportation, cultural and telecommunications systems in order to provide these services equally across our vast land. We have established laws to protect working people and provide for them if they become unemployed. As a result, while our country is far from perfect, Canadians enjoys a quality of life, and an absence of daily violence, that many Americans long for.

Free trade is ending all that. In barely three years, we have lost fully one-quarter of our manufacturing jobs as industry moved south, and our unemployment rate, now at 12%, continues to rise. We gave up our rights to control our own energy supplies, or to establish ground rules for American corporations operating in our country (which already has by far the largest amount of foreign corporate control of any country in the industrialized world). We have had to privatize many of our public services, and are fast losing our precious universal social programs. The free-trade agreement has shifted economic power from elected governments to the private sector, and it locks future Canadian governments into this model. For Canada, the issue goes to heart of our identity, our culture and our very existence.

Canada is the canary in the North American free-trade mine shaft. Using trade to force standards down in partner countries serves no thoughtful American agenda, and creating a destabilized, impoverished northern neighbor serves no American interest--nor will losing the only model on the continent that many Americans look to for better social programs.

The form of hemispheric free trade now being negotiated, because it contains no social, environmental or labor standards, will pit all of the countries of the Americas in open competition against each other to attract business. In the name of competitiveness, we will enter into a scenario of competitive poverty--a race to the bottom--in which people’s lives and the environment become pawns in a game of corporate chess.

The losers are the citizens of the countries involved and the environment everywhere. The winners are the large corporations that can move production where people are most desperate for work, and governments that turn a blind eye to corporate environmental crime. The transnationals behind free trade have severed national ties in their countries of origin and serve only the gods of profit. For them, free trade is essential to survival in the global economy they have created. Free trade is a corporate Magna Carta.

This year marks the 500-year anniversary of the colonization of the Americas. The North American free-trade agreement, the modern version of that event, shows that we haven’t learned very much in the intervening centuries. We who share this great continent are jointly responsible for its future. We can do better.