Canada joins Transatlantic Union effort

Canada has decided to join the United States in negotiating a transatlantic free trade agreement with the European Union.

According to Canada's daily Financial Post, Canada and the EU have come to an agreement on the areas they would like to negotiate in a free trade deal that Canadian government officials believe could expand Canada's economy by approximately $12 billion.

The agreement announced last Thursday concluded "scoping exercises" between Canada and the EU that began Oct. 17. The exercises determined 14 areas to be placed on the negotiating table, including trade in goods and services, investment, trade facilitation, customs regulation, technical barriers to trade, competition policy and sustainable development.

As WND has reported, "competition" is a key free-trade theme that shows up, for instance, in the 30-member North American Competitiveness Council, the 30-member multinational advisory council selected by the chambers of commerce in the U.S., Mexico and Canada to advise the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America.

"Sustainable development" is a code term coined by the United Nations' Agenda 21, which critics have charged outlines a globalist agenda for redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor, on the premise wealth is accumulated at the expense of the poor.

As WND previously reported, a key step in advancing the goal of creating a Transatlantic Union was the creation of the Transatlantic Economic Council by the U.S. and the EU through an agreement signed by President Bush, German Chancellor Angela Merkel – then the president of the European Council – and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso at a White House summit April 30, 2007.

The agreement constituted the Transatlantic Economic Council as a permanent body that committed the U.S. to "deeper transatlantic economic integration," without ratification by the Senate as a treaty or passage by Congress as a law.

The formation of a Transatlantic Common Market between the U.S. and the European Union by 2015 has been targeted by the http://www.tpnonline.org/about.html Transatlantic Policy Network, a non-governmental organization headquartered in Washington and Brussels with a policy advisory board of U.S. congressmen and senators.

In February 2007, the Transatlantic Policy Network formed a Transatlantic Market Implementation Group to put in place a "a roadmap and framework" to direct the activity of the Transatlantic Economic Council to achieve the creation of the Transatlantic Common Market by 2015.

The Transatlantic Policy Network is chaired by Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, and advised by a bipartisan congressional policy group consisting of six U.S. senators and 49 U.S. congressmen.

Another NGO urging transatlantic integration is the Atlantic Council of the United States, a Washington-based policy group headed by former Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., who currently serves as the group's chairman of the board.

On April 20, 2007, an Atlantic Council commission co-chaired by Stuart E. Eisenstat, former deputy-secretary of the treasury, and Grant D. Aldonas, former under-secretary of commerce for international trade, issued a report entitled "Transatlantic Leadership for a New Global Economy."

The report argued that to deal with a new international economy, the U.S. and EU "must lead a major effort to restructure the governing institutions of that economy and seek new ways to reduce barriers to trade and investment."

Among the group's recommendations was that the U.S. and EU should establish a "barrier-free Enhanced Trade Market" as a first step toward moving into a "more open global market."

As WND previously reported, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger openly called for the Obama administration to manipulate the current financial crisis to create a "new world order."

Kissinger's commentary in the International Herald Tribune made clear globalists intend to utilize the current financial meltdown. In developing his call for action, Kissinger also made clear that his view of globalism involves a lessening of American power and influence to elevate less-advantaged countries.

"The economic world has been globalized," Kissinger proclaimed. "Its institutions have a global reach and have operated by maxims that assumed a self-regulating global market."

Kissinger warned against individual countries taking action through national political institutions to cushion the shock of the current financial decline, with a view to ameliorating their domestic economies.

Rather than focus on domestic politics, Kissinger said the solution involves creating global political institutions to better govern and regulate global economic markets and institutions.

"Every major country has attempted to solve its immediate problems essentially on its own and to defer common action to a later, less crisis-driven point," Kissinger wrote. "So called rescue packages have emerged on a piecemeal national basis, generally by substituting unlimited governmental credit for the domestic credit that produced the debacle in the first place – so far without more than stemming incipient panic."

Kissinger strongly objected to nation-states action as such to protect their domestic economies.

"In the end, the political and economic systems can be harmonized in only one of two ways: by creating an international political regulatory system with the same reach as that of the economic world," he suggests, "or by shrinking the economic units to a size manageable by existing political structures, which is likely to lead to a new mercantilism, perhaps of regional units."