While Stephen Harper, George Bush, Felipe Calderon and the CEOs from the NA Competitiveness Council hung out at the “jellybean summit” (as Maude Barlow has coined it), I was spending my time with Mexican and American electricity and oil workers who have every reason to believe that there is much more at stake here than jellybeans.

The Mexicans joined CEP, CUPE and the United Steelworkers in a trilateral meeting of energy workers in Montreal, organized with the help of the hemispheric solidarity networks from Canada, Quebec, the US and Mexico. We came together to assess the North American energy agenda that the SPP was promoting.

It is an agenda for continental integration so startling that it is better understood coming directly from them rather than from those of us who stood on the street of Montebello in protest. At Montebello, the “North American Competitiveness Council” delivered their “Report to Leaders.” (Read it yourself on the web site of the Canadian Council of Chief Executive Officers www.ceocouncil.ca )

Among the dozens of recommendations from business to the three governments there are two pages of proposals on energy, including these recommendations dealing with Mexico:

• A “Mexican domestic policy reform” which by 2010 would allow Mexican corporations to buy electricity directly from US producers.
• Also by 2010 to break up Mexico’s national oil company, PEMEX, with the spin off of its natural gas division into a new corporation to be called GASMEX.
• By 2008 to put out “a benchmark analysis that illustrates PEMEX’s operating and financial performance gaps.”

This is not jellybean stuff. These recommendations, among others, are aimed at dismantling Mexico’s publicly owned and managed energy sector. According to the Mexican labour and political leaders that I met, they violate the spirit, if not the letter, of Mexico’s constitution which enshrines energy as a public good.

The Report to Leaders also highlights the work of the “North American Energy Working Group” and the SPP meeting in July of the energy ministers of the three countries in Victoria, BC. If you missed an earlier commentary on the NAEWG, and our federal energy minister Gary Lunn’s SPP agenda to “cut in half” the time it takes to approve oil pipelines – you can get that info in my August 14 posting at www.cep.ca.

You can imagine the consternation of CEP officers who hear a federal Minister use the SPP to drive the bitumen export agenda that we are opposing before the National Energy Board. “Are we wasting our time?” is the obvious question.

But then imagine what it means to our Mexican colleagues when they see proposals for a so-called “domestic policy reform” in their country - a reform that is not for public debate in Mexico, but for discussion between business leaders and heads of state in Montebello, Quebec.

That is why CEP’s Dave Coles was at Montebello to confront the police agent provocateurs and why CEP’s Gaétan Menard and his family took their boat down the Ottawa River with the banner “no secret deals.” And why Mexican trade unionists came to Canada in solidarity and joined us in the streets of Montebello.

Here is the joint declaration from the Montreal meeting of energy workers from Canada, the US and Mexico: http://www.cep.ca/cep_on_line/spp/spp_statement_e.pdf

If you would like to have this statement in Spanish, send me an email at fwilson@cep.ca.