Rumor or fact? Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. That’s how we feel about the North American Union, (NAU).
You might not know what NAU is. That’s okay, we’re not quite sure either.
Some say it’s a plan to merge the United States, Canada, and Mexico into one political entity like the European Union. The borders will almost disappear. American sovereignty will be nostalgia.
Others say that the NAU won’t happen; that it’s just a paranoid fantasy of conspiracy theorists.
But only DownsizeDC.org actually has a method for stopping what appears to be a real plan that would have Mexican bureaucrats creating taxes and regulations for Americans and their businesses.
We doubt that the NAU will be _formally_ created anytime soon. If it was put to a vote, Americans would reject the NAU. They won’t accept laws made in Montreal or Mexico City. Few members of Congress could endorse the NAU and get away with it.
But the creation of the European Union was gradual and subtle.
Step one was the creation of a European Coal and Steel Community in the early 1950s. This “community” evolved step by tiny step into a Common Market. Eventually, it became the formal European Union. The noble idea of “free trade” was ushered, with dull Fabian progress, into a system where a British grocer could be arrested for selling fruit by the pound instead of the kilogram.
Could something like that happen here? The first U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement was signed in the 1980s. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which included Mexico, was ratified in the early 1990s. NAFTA has its own Secretariat able to issue binding rulings despite the American political process or the will of the people.
It appears that the “next step” toward a NAU is the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP).
The SPP is both a plan and a process. It is a plan for the United States, Canada, and Mexico to have the same economic, environmental, and security policies. According to its own website at spp.gov (website no longer up, as of April 2012), the SPP seeks:
- A common public health policy to address the (phony) “bird flu” crisis.
- “Regulatory compatibility,” so that businesses in the three countries are bound to operate under the same rules.
- A common energy policy for the three countries.
- Joint plans for emergency management.
- Cooperation on cross-border travel, including identical standards for documents and biometric screening of individuals.
- The creation of “express” lanes at the U.S.-Mexico border to allow Mexican trucks to sail through customs easily, part of a rumored plan to build a giant NAFTA “superhighway” linking Mexico and Canada.
- Even more input by big corporations in setting policy.
The SPP assumes that the culture, economy, and environments of Canada’s prairie provinces, New York City, and southern Mexico are all the same. In other words, the SPP treats the three countries of North America AS IF THEY ARE ONE NATION.
And these “uniform standards” will have “high-level business input;” they will be created for the benefit of large corporations, leaving small business and the people with no voice and perhaps even no place in the market.
Instead of Downsizing government, a proposed SPP would Supersize government, exercising minute control over things like dietary supplements and agricultural procedures. And as if that’s not bad enough, the SPP makes governing an even more distant and less accountable process.
The SPP is apparently real. It was the creation of the Presidents of the United States and Mexico and the Prime Minister of Canada in 2005. Its breadth and scope are yet to be determined.
But what really concerns us the most is that un-elected bureaucrats are tasked with implementing the SPP. Un-elected bureaucrats will write the laws! If this process continues, then Congress, the Constitution, and especially the American people will be by-passed as un-elected officials from the three countries almost secretly conspire to gradually, even hypnotically, impose the SPP regime on all of us.
DownsizeDC.org has the weapon to derail the SPP and stop the formation of a North American Union. It is the Write the Laws Act (WTLA).
The WTLA prevents bureaucrats from writing binding regulations (a.k.a., laws) without oversight. It makes Congress vote on all regulations, which, coincidentally, is just what the Constitution requires.
And if Congress wrote, read, and debated _all_ the rules the bureaucrats invented, and only after doing these things voted on whether those rules should be law, government wouldn’t grow so fast. Hare-brained schemes like permitting Canadian bureaucrats to make our laws identical to Mexico’s would be laughed off the floor.
The WTLA is a new DownsizeDC.org proposal. It doesn’t have a sponsor – yet.
But DownsizeDC.org makes it simple for you to let Congress know you want the WTLA. And if Congress gets enough messages about the WTLA, then the WTLA will get a sponsor.
Passing the Write the Laws Act will put the SPP on hold. EVERY regulation the SPP wants would have to be passed by Congress. This will likely put a stop to the SPP and bring the Big Government dream of a North American Union to an end.
You can tell your representative and Senators to sponsor and pass the Write the Laws Act by clicking here.
James Wilson
Assistant to the President
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.
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