The Straight Goods Report

CBC commentary, Unvirtual Summit Bureau, Greener Grass returns, and Thanks for making the Spring Drive to Survive a Success!

By: Ish Theilheimer, Publisher, Straight Goods

  CBC Radio commentary. For the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City this week, Straight Goods was asked to do a series of commentaries for CBC Radio. They'll be airing Wednesday through Friday, April 18-20. What follows is an edited verison of the first of the three columns:

  Recent news shows that intense citizen scrutiny of the FTAA Summit is having a healthy, democratic effect. Governments are now at pains to show they're responsive to citizens.
  More than ever before, major international talks are under the public microscope. And Canadians are making themselves heard. There are a lot of strong and differing opinions, even in places where you'd expect a party line.
  Straight Goods reader Dennis Prouse, for instance, summed up the pro-deal sentiment in a recent letter: "I support free trade, as it raises my standard of living and that of others in our community. Here on the West Coast, for example, we are fighting for free trade in lumber - under your protectionist view of the world, thousands of BC families would go hungry."
  On the other hand, readers like Jesse Greener of London, Ontario tell us "Citizens are demanding to know what conditions are being negotiated on our behalf in the FTAA. A badly thought-out position could ruin all that we have in a blink of an eye."
  An Internet search on "benefits of free trade" or "FTAA Canada" yields quite a lot.
  Official sites tend to be pretty dry and full of platitudes. The best is probably www.AmericasCanada.org, operated by the Hemisphere Summit Office.
  You might want to scan through some of the policy sites. A good one documents a 1999 McGill conference on the tenth anniversary of Canada-US Free Trade (www.freetradeat10.com). An ambivalent paper there by Royal Bank economist John McCallum shows how hard it is for even its boosters to say exactly what free trade has done for us - or to us.
  The ultra-conservative Cato Institute in the US has one of the most accessible pro-trade sites - www.freetrade.org. It offers a well-expressed, fundamentalist viewpoint.
  An Australian site called www.globalisationguide.org has a good cost-benefit analysis with no obvious biases.
  To get a grounded view about everyday impacts of free trade, I e-mailed journalist, author, Web surfer and Calgary housewife Penney Kome.
  In local stores, Penney says she mostly sees more overpriced imports of dubious quality since free trade. The main exception is her local co-op - www.calgarycoop.com - where she saves money buying the house brand, which maintains quality standards and insists on local sources. That's the opposite of what companies do under free trade.
  Penney experienced some free trade downsides this winter when Alberta privatized electricity - doubling hydro bills - and deregulated natural gas - tripling gas bills. The University of Alberta's Parkland Institute documents this well at www.ualberta.ca/PARKLAND/ESenergyfreetrade.html.
  Penney's worried about rising drug prices if multinational drug companies win the stronger patent protection that they're trying for under FTAA especially since she visited the Consumer Project on Technology website www.cptech.org/pharm/belopaper.html.
  Patent rights, health care, public services, consumer prices, workplace rights, the global environment - they're all up for negotiation.
  This time, the public can watch and take part more effectively than ever.
  Public scrutiny makes a difference.
  YOU are the public. So take to the Web, learn all you can, and get into this critical debate.

  The Straight Goods Unvirtual Summit Bureau. My friend and fellow director Mel Watkins and I are driving off to Quebec City together for six days and five nights of hot times. In a hotel room miraculously procured by the Canadian Labour Congress, we're setting up the Straight Goods Summit bureau.
  We've been recruiting correspondents through our e-mail bulletin, and our roster so far is impressive, including some folks we don't know at all, some SG correspondents, and one person I've actually met in the flesh - Mel. It will include writers and activists from all over. The roster so far includes Paul Pellizzari, Eric Mills, Geoff Chan,Tabassum Siddiqui, Loretta Gerlach , Darryl Leroux, Arlene Clement, Gary Morton, Linda Dawn Hammond, Tammy Thorne, Chris Osler, and Holly Dressel. Together, we'll be providing daily behind-the-scenes reporting and analysis. If you want to be part of our Summit team, please contact summitnews@straightgoods.com.
  So we'll see what a week in a hotel room does to Mel's and my friendship, especially if the computer's going all night, neither of us sleeps much and the floor of the room is littered with bodies in sleeping bags. It may make us all long for the sanitary comforts of our virtual office.

  Teach your parents well. Crosby Stills and Nash are much in mind this week as I surf for info on globalization. Young activists, it appears, have lots to teach their parents' generation about political analysis and activism. One of our newest correspondents, Darryl Leroux helps get behind the new youth activism that's given us creative movements like Indymedia, Radical Cheerleading and Students Against Sweatshops.

  Greener grass returns - Canuck kids are cheaper. There's lots of other news this week at Straight Goods besides the Summit, but we've only time to highlight one item: Canadian kids are cheaper. Lanny Boutin provides the first of a series of articles revisiting life on either side of the Canada-US border and finds that, thanks to universal publicly-funded health care, it's a lot cheaper to raise kids in Canada, even before considerations of exchange rates.

  Drive to Survive Succeeds! Thanks to all the people who supported Straight Goods in our Drive to Survive the Spring. We raised more than $15,000 from readers, and while it probably isn't enough to stave off another drive rather too soon, it's a tremendous boost and terribly gratifying to know so many readers support Straight Goods. A partial list of the places where our supporters live reads like the famous Hank Snow song "I've been everywhere."
  It's nice to know we've got friends and supporters in Abbotsford, Ajax, Ancaster, Aylmer, Belle River, Bowmanville, Bridgewater , Bright, Bristol, Burlington, Burnaby, Calgary, Cambridge, Carp, Chester Basin, Cobourg, Cormac , Cutler, Dalkeith, Dartmouth, Debert, Deep River, Denman Island, Douglas , Dundas, Edmonton, Estevan, Glenburnie, Gloucester, Godfrey, Golden Lake, Grand Rapids, Halifax, Hamilton, Harrow, Ilderton, Innisfail, Kamloops, Kanata, Keremeos, Killaloe, Kingston, Ladysmith, Langley, London, Loretto, Low, Madeira Park, Manotick, Meaford, Mississauga, Moose Jaw, Nain, Labrador, Nepean, New Liskeard, Oakville, Olds, Olympia, Orillia, Ottawa, Pembroke, Perth Rd. Village, Peterborough, Porquis Junction, Regina, Richmond, Richmond Hill, Riondel, Saskatoon, Scarborough, Seattle, Sechelt, Seeleys Bay, St-Laurent, St. Andrews, St. Catherines, St. Isidore, St. Paul, Stittsville, Stoney Creek, Stratford, Sudbury, Sydney , Sydney River, Tecumseh, Toronto, Vancouver, Vernon, Victoria, Waterloo, Whitehorse, Whiterock, Windsor, Winnipeg, Winnipeg, and Woodlawn. Thank you to our wonderful readers everywhere!

The Straight Goods Report is a new weekly column being distributed to newspapers, web 'zines and portals, and radio stations all over Canada. You need not ask permission to reproduce it in your print or web publication, but please include our URL and let us know where you are posting it.

- Ish Theilheimer
- Killaloe, Ontario
- April 16, 2001
- ish@straightgoods.com

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