Dallas Morning News | Sept. 5, 2007

By Jim Landers

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - If you want to lose an election in Canada, tell voters you favor an American-style health care system. If you want to lose in Mexico, tell them you favor selling off Pemex, the national oil company, to American buyers.

And if you want to lose in the United States, tell the voters you favor open borders where Mexican workers can come and go as they please.

Worries about a North American union among the United States, Canada and Mexico are far-fetched, given the pride and tenacity the people of each nation feel about their sovereignty.

Yet they persist - on the political right in the United States, and the political left in Canada and Mexico. Demagogues use them to shout "fire!" in a theater of people uneasy about globalization. They are slowing or defeating policy changes in all three countries on health care, energy and immigration.

Last month, as the leaders of Canada, Mexico and the United States met in Quebec, they were asked about concerns that they were plotting a North American union. President Bush rightly called this "political scare tactics."

"You know, there are some who would like to frighten our fellow citizens into believing that relations between us are harmful for our respective peoples. I just believe they're wrong," Mr. Bush said. "I believe it's in our interest to trade; I believe it's in our interest to dialogue; I believe it's in our interest to work out common problems for the good of our people."

Fear mongers say multinational corporations are behind the alleged conspiracy to create a North American union. Business people from the three nations did brief the leaders on their concerns at the Quebec summit. But it hardly sounded conspiratorial.

Canada's prime minister, Stephen Harper, recalled a jelly bean maker asking the leaders why it was necessary to meet different standards and thus maintain different inventories for jelly beans in the United States and Canada.

"Is the sovereignty of Canada going to fall apart if we standardize the jelly bean? I don't think so," Mr. Harper said.

Mr. Bush saw his hopes for immigration reform demolished this summer by conservatives who complained that it amounted to amnesty for those illegally in the country and open borders so employers could hire Mexicans at lower wages.

Many of those same voices are now warning about the planned NAFTA superhighway running from Mexico to Canada as a road that would attack sovereignty by allowing multinationals to sweep imports into the manufacturing heartland of the United States and Canada. If projects like the Trans-Texas Corridor aren't built, however, I-35 will become even more congested and the result will be a trade bottleneck and higher prices.

Canadians are aroused by anything that smacks of greater U.S. dominion over their sovereignty. There's a struggle under way among Canadian physicians over whether private clinics would ease some of the long waiting lines that Canadians face for such things as MRI exams, orthopedic care and heart surgery.

Brian Day, a Vancouver orthopedic surgeon, was elected president of the Canadian Medical Association last month on a platform of bringing some types of private medicine and business practices to Canada's socialized medicine.

His opponents called this the thin edge of a wedge that would allow American insurers and health care providers to come into Canada and bring with them the financial insecurity faced by many Americans over whether they could afford medical treatment.

Mexico's President Felipe Calderón has the most pressing need among the three leaders for reforms that opponents challenge on the basis of sovereignty. Oil production is falling rapidly, thanks to politicians who have used Pemex as a piggy bank rather than letting the company spend for needed investments in technology and new exploration and production. Even limited degrees of foreign investment would help, but the political left insists on keeping out the dreaded American oil companies.

Whether these changes are good or bad is worth national debate, without the scare tactics over sovereignty.