What political cause could put Canadian lefties on the same side of the picket line as American ultranationalists? The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, or SPP. The two-year-old White House-led initiative to promote security and economic ties between the United States, Canada, and Mexico has flown so far under the radar that few people have even heard of it. Little has been reported on the discussions, and the scant and vague explanations have conspiracy theories flying. The right-wing John Birch Society is sounding alarms that the SPP will dissolve U.S. sovereignty, European Union-style. According to Intelligence Report (Summer 2007), congressional conservatives have tapped into the paranoid mojo, with Colorado representative Tom Tancredo and other Republicans backing federal legislation denouncing a “North American Union” and several state legislatures fielding similar resolutions. In Canada, This Magazine (July/Aug. 2007) reports, it’s liberals who are crying foul, albeit for wildly different reasons. Fears are brewing that the SPP could open Canada’s borders to the United States’ pesticide-ridden foods through laxer regulations on produce imports and could increase oil exports from Canada to the United States, which would build up America’s reserves at the expense of Canada’s. Still, the protests and conspiracy theories may be much ado about nothing. American University professor Robert A. Pastor, an architect of some of the SPP’s ideas, tells Intelligence Report that the initiative might suffer a slow death by bureaucracy.
