"North American Parliament" Meets At Integration Forum

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"North American Parliament" Meets At Integration Forum
Students trained in "sense of belonging to North America"

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Tuesday, May 27, 2008

A simulation of a North American Parliament, designed to "develop the participants' sense of belonging to North America" and "and promote the creation of North American academia networks" is currently taking place in Montreal.

100 selected students from universities in the U.S., Canada and Mexico have been selected to take on the roles of Legislators, Journalists and Lobbyists, in the fourth annual Triumvirate of the North American Forum on Integration.

The meeting represents another example of an overarching movement on behalf of globalist business leaders and politicians to merge the three nations of North America into an EU like federation.

Participants at the Triumvirate discuss draft bills on issues such as trade corridors, immigration, NAFTA’s Chapter 11 and renewable energy.

While the meeting is billed as an exercise to debate these areas of policy, there is no simulated opposition to the overall agenda and the documents provided to participants represent little more than essays debunking opponents of NAFTA, attacking traders who do not adhere to a North American union model, presenting methods of control such as the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative which considers biometric RFID cards for border crossings, and promoting the agenda of NAFI itself which it makes clear is to forge North American integration.

The Triumvirate also has its own Constitution and Participant's handbook which calls for the creation of a "Trilateral Legislative Commission" and even outlines the need for more "secret meetings" (pg20-21) in the vain of the controversial Security and Prosperity Partnership.

"Legislators" are set the task of "representing a country other than their own" in a parliament at the federal level or at the state/provincial level. While "lobbyists" must ensure that the interests of their organization (assigned to them by NAFI) are upheld in drafted resolutions.

The Triumvirate even has its own mock newspaper, operated by the students playing the roles of journalists. According to NAFI, the TrilatHerald, "covers the developments and evolution of the debates, the press conferences, and interviews with conference speakers, legislators and lobbyists."

This highlights the importance the architects of the North American union agenda place upon the role of the media. Public perception is key, reporting on the movement must be strictly framed to project a positive image and this is why the role of journalists is placed on a par with that of legislators and lobbyists by the organizers.

The main objectives of the Triumvirate are listed as:

To bring future Canadian, American and Mexican leaders together in order to experience and take part in an international negotiation exercise.
To allow participants to familiarize themselves with the functioning of democratic institutions as well as North American political, economic, environmental and social realities.
To develop the participants' sense of belonging to North America.
To increase intercultural exchanges and promote the creation of North American academia networks.
To inform the current decision makers of the priorities and concerns of North American youth.

Speakers at the meeting this year include Former Premier of Québec, Pierre Marc Johnson, Leader of the Bloc Québécois Gilles Duceppe, Dr. Ruby Dhalla Member of Parliament (Liberal Party) Member of the Canada-United States Interparliamentary Group, and Jack Layton, Leader of the New Democratic Party.

The universities taking part this year include The State University of New York, Brigham Young University, University of Texas at Dallas, Universidad de Monterrey, Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México, University of Alberta, Arizona State University, Centre d'Études et de Recherche Internationales de l'Université de Montréal (CÉRIUM), University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Cincinnati.

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According to their website, NAFI “aims to address the issues raised by North American integration as well as identify new ideas and strategies to reinforce the North American region,” and hold “NAFI organized conferences which brought together government and academic figures as well as business people.”

The first conference was held in Montreal in 2003, the second in 2004 in Mexico, of which was stated on the organization’s website: “About 200 participants and conference speakers took part in the conference, [including] former Energy Minister, Mr. Felipe Calderon,” the current President of Mexico.

The NAFI Triumvirate exercise first began in May 2005, shortly after the initial Security and Prosperity Partnership agreement was signed by President Bush, then-Mexican President Vicente Fox and then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Texas, on March 23.

The first Triumvirate took place in the Canadian Senate and was hosted by the Triumvirate president and former ambassador to both Mexico and the U.S Raymond Chrétien, the son of Jean Chrétien.

At the time NAFI authored a press release entitled “A North American Parliament is Born”.

"The creation of a North American parliament, such as the one being simulated by these young people, should be considered," commented Chretien.

The board of directors of NAFI includes Stephen Blank, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Robert Pastor, vice chairman of the CFR Task Force on North America and professor and director of the Center for North American Studies at American University.

Pastor has previously testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on the idea of merging the United States, Mexico and Canada in a North American union stretching from Prudhoe Bay to Guatemala.

Pastor, one of the architects of the plan for a regional government, has also authored a book titled "Toward a North American Community," and speaks at confabs in front of governmental officials, promoting the adoption of the amero as a common monetary currency to replace the dollar and the peso.

In his role at the CFR, Pastor oversaw the publication of the 2005 CFR document called "Building a North American Community" which bragged that its recommendations are "explicitly linked" to SPP. The document called for establishing a "common perimeter" around North America by 2010, the development of a biometric North American border pass, and the adoption of a North American tariff."

Further CFR documents have revealed that the group wants to "establish private bodies that would meet regularly or annually to buttress North American relationships, along the lines of the Bilderberg conferences." (Bilderberg are the power brokers behind the formation of the EU and the single European currency)

The document presents itself as a blueprint for using bureaucratic action within the executive branches of Mexico, the U.S. and Canada to transform the current trilateral Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America into a North American union regional government.

We have previously highlighted the role NAFI has played in identifying four bands of NAFTA corridors (Pacific, West, East and Atlantic), all relying primarily upon internationalizing north-south existing interstate highways into NAFTA trade corridors.

The NAFI website states the following:

"Following the implementation of NAFTA, coalitions of interest have been formed in order to promote specific transport channels, to develop the infrastructures of these channels and to propose jurisdictional amendments to facilitate the crossing of borders. These coalitions include businesses, government agencies, civil organizations, metropolitan areas, rural communities and also individuals, wishing to strengthen the commercial hubs of their regions."

"The North American trade corridors are bi- or tri-national channels for which various cross-border interests have grouped together in order to develop or consolidate the infrastructures. The North American corridors are considered multimodal in the sense that they bring into play different modes of transport in succession."

"The infrastructures may include roads, highways, transit routes, airports, pipelines, railways and train stations, river canal systems and port facilities, telecommunications networks and teleports."

The architects of this unification are not just in name merging the agencies and the laws and the regulations, they are physically getting rid of the borders by buying off and lobbying the politicians at the state level, who then hand the roads and other public amenities over to international bodies and their subsidiary companies.

This is all being made possible by "public-private partnerships" under the stewardship of the SPP. These agreements are essentially Government-sanctioned monopolies that operate without Congressional oversight. PPP's are contracts between public agencies and private entities that enable private sector participation in public amenities.

Most recently, a Spanish toll road operator won the right to operate the Pennsylvania Turnpike on a 75-year lease in a $12.8 billion proposal, the largest ever bid for the private operation of a U.S. toll road.

The North American Integration agenda represents a final culling of what remaining power the people have, via democratic sovereign institutions. The SPP operates in stealth as an organized infrastructure outside the governmental framework of the three countries it encompasses, and is literally re-writing administrative law to "integrate" and "harmonize" the processes of government across the borders.

It constitutes the handing over of power to an unelected elite few, a gaggle of unaccountable bureaucrats whose strings are operated by global corporations and international banks.

Integration meetings such as the NAFI Triumvirate are simulations of the exact practices currently being undertaken by the SPP and it's offshoot organizations. The NAFI Triumvirate is designed to familiarize "future Canadian, American and Mexican leaders" with the processes involved in such practices.

The simulated process mirrors the activities of entities such as the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC), an advisory Council Comprised of 30 senior private sector representatives of North American corporations that were selected by the American, Canadian and Mexican governments at the June 2006 trilateral meeting in Cancun, Mexico.

Recently, internal memos from Canada's Foreign Affairs and Internal Trade ministry revealed that heads of state of the U.S., Mexico and Canada beseeched business leaders at the NACC to launch public relations campaigns in order to counter critics of the SPP and the North American Union agenda.

However, the mainstream media will keep telling you the North American Union agenda is not real, that its on a par with invading space aliens and that if you believe in any of it you are totally crazy.