Writings of J. Todd Ring

Fortress North America:
Deep Integration in The New Security Environment

The single most pressing issue for Canada at present is our imminent “deep integration” into what U.S., Canadian and Mexican business and political elites are calling “Fortress North America”. If Canadians do not quickly discover what is happening with this rapidly progressing plan, and act decisively to end our involvement in it, then action on all other issues will be rendered pointless. Unfortunately, so far no one is paying attention.

Health care, day care, pensions, labour standards, wages, working conditions, poverty, education, housing, the environment: all of these issues are subsumed by our ongoing and accelerating involvement in Fortress North America.

More fundamentally, our democracy is critically at stake – we will not have a choice on these matters under the new North American Union. And beyond all of this, our very freedom is at stake – including our most basic human rights.

If you think that having universal access to health care and education is important, how much more important is your basic right of habeas corpus – the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, the right to freedom from arbitrary arrest without charge, and the right to a fair and impartial trial by peers, with access to a lawyer?

When you can be picked up off the street and arrested without charge, sent off to prison or a detention centre indefinitely, without trial or recourse to a lawyer, and further, may be tortured – which is now the law of the land in the U.S., since the Military Commissions Act was signed into law on October 16, 2006, and which will be the law of the land for Canada after “harmonization” and “integration” of our legal, military, intelligence and economic systems has become finalized under the North American “Security and Prosperity Partnership” agreement – how much more fundamental is this than even access to education or health care?

Prime Ministers Mulroney (Free Trade Agreement, 1985), Chrétien (North American Free Trade Agreement, 1991), Martin (Security and Prosperity Partnership, 2005) and Harper (North American Forum, September 12-14, 2006), have all led us further toward “deep integration” within the “new security environment” of “Fortress North America”. We now stand on the threshold of complete integration into the new North American Union, or more to the point, the new North American “Homeland”.

While the economic, cultural and sovereignty issues entailed in our rapidly progressing “integration” are enormous, not to mention the profound implications for Canadian social programs, such as health care, pensions and education, or the giant question of the environmental implications of such a merger; the single most pressing issue within the “deep integration” that is being quietly carried out behind closed doors, is the fact that the most dominant player in this merger – the U.S., by a landslide – is now a fascist state. You heard me. The U.S. is now a fascist state. The Military Commissions Act which was passed on October 16, 2006 was the final legal straw to break the back of the American Constitution. The U.S. Constitution has been nullified by the fascist legislation of the Bush government. We have now joined in a deep merger with a fascist state. Does this not sound alarm bells? If it does not, we are dead to the world.

The timeline:

The authors of this splendid idea of one continental mega-government (dominated by the biggest of the transnational corporate powers of course) is the Council on Foreign Relations’ Task Force on North America. The authors’ deadline for full continental integration into the new North American Union: 2010.

The SPP’s deadline for completing a “trilateral regulatory cooperation framework”: 2007.

"So, just who are these people who want to continue and accelerate the sale of Canada? They are, of course, Tom d'Aquino and the CCCE [the Council of Canadian Chief Executives], the big chartered banks led by the Royal Bank of Canada (sorry RBC), the big foreign oil companies, the so-called think tanks who are funded by all of the above - The C.D. Howe and Fraser Institutes, the IRPP (Chairman Bob Rae!), and that awful Allan Gotlieb's American-financed Donner Institue that passes out hundreds of thousands of dollars to Fraser, The Atlantic Institute etc. They are people such as John Manley, Gordon Nixon, Paul Tellier, Derek Burney, Michael Wilson, Wendy Dobson and other Brian Mulroney buddies. They are the whole crew who frequently visit Washington as though they officially represent the will of the Canadian people, while the public opinion polls show, poll after poll, year after year, that the vast majority of Canadians want nothing to do with their deep integration, NAFTA-Plus, Big-Idea, Grand-Bargain, truly disgusting treachery.”