Ask not for whom the road tolls, it tolls for thee

Laila Yuile writes about the shadow toll on the Sea-to-Sky Highway.
What's a shadow toll?
It's the one no one told you about, the one you can't see.
But it can see you.

There's an interesting story about Macquarie, the Australian investment bank group which among things acts as transportation project managers and road toll operators all over the world, including the Sea-to-Sky Highway in BC and the Highway 407 Express Toll Route in Ontario, the first privatized toll road in Canada.

Say, how's that Nafta Superhighway Trade Corridor coming along?

Haven't heard much about the NAFTA Superhighway Trade Corridor since it got promoted from a conspiracy theory to a US Dept of Energy plan called the Western Energy Corridor, embraced by Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the US Western Governors' Association, and now known as the Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor Initiative.

But it cropped up in the news today.

CBC : Regina farmer upset about expropriation of his land

"Questions are being raised about the Saskatchewan government's role in a massive rail and warehousing project involving grocery giant Loblaws.
The province has used its legal powers of expropriation to obtain farmland for what's called the Global Transportation Hub."

The Global Transportation Hub, courtesy of the Gov of Sask :

*The GTH is located in the middle of Saskatchewan, which provides centralized access to the North American economy

*Direct main line rail access to Vancouver, Toronto, Halifax, Gulf coast and Great Lakes ports and Midwestern U.S. trans shipment points
*Trucking connections to all major networks including Montreal (trans-Canada), Minneapolis/St.Paul, Chicago and points south and west, including Mexico

CBC :

"Since the project was announced two years ago, the province has also expropriated land for Loblaw Companies Ltd. to build a one-million-square-foot (92,903 square-metre) warehouse and distribution centre. 

John Law, head of the government-created authority managing the warehouse project, said Loblaws would not have considered Regina for its warehouse if it had been forced to negotiate for land.

Faced with the prospect of losing a major investor, the government had to act quickly and so it did, Law said. "

So in order to further its Nafta Trade Corridor ambitions, the government of Saskatchewan expropriated land from a farmer for the benefit of a corporation.

Good to know.

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The Emperor Strikes Back

What is Emperor Steve fooling around with in his pocket this time?

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Oooh - it's the nine new Senators he appointed yesterday.

That makes 27 Cons he's appointed in less than a year, bringing his posse in the Senate up to 46 out 0f 105 senators.

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G&M : "At an event in Quebec City, the Prime Minister said he had to nominate unelected Conservative supporters to the Senate to ensure that his government, which won a minority last year, gets its legislation approved."

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There's some Con Party presidents and backroom operatives and Steve's communications aide from the PMO among the unelected ... plus a hockey analyst who remarked yesterday that his appointment meant he was "going to have to start following [federal politics]" now.

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Three Liberals and one independent are due to resign in coming months, presumbly meaning four more unelected Consenators to enable the party with 22+% of the vote to push their reformy crap through the Senate, but unfortunately we also learned yesterday from the Libs that "Canadians aren't clamouring for an election".

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Today Steve appointed former NDP Manitoba premier and NASCO enthusiast Gary Doer to be our new US ambassador.

No, not NASCAR - NASCO : North American SuperCorridor Coalition - the apparently imaginary yet somehow ubiquitous NAFTA Superhighway supporters.

Doer gave the keynote address at NASCO last year and here he is plumping it in his 2007 Manitoba Throne Speech :

"Manitoba is also taking a major role in the development of a Mid-Continent Trade Corridor, connecting our northern Port of Churchill with trade markets throughout the central United States and Mexico. To advance the concept, an alliance has been built with business leaders and state and city governments spanning the entire length of the Corridor."

Canadian Corridor Ambassador to the US? He's been ready with that shovel for years.

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Premiers, governors endorse North American energy super-corridor

"Forget the Persian Gulf: Fort McMurray to Port Arthur, Texas is new powerhouse"

Western premiers and U. S. governors on Sunday hailed their push to develop a cross-border Western Energy Corridor.

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, Alberta's Ed Stelmach, and Manitoba's Gary Doer were in Utah for the Western Governors' Association annual conference "to explore a broader energy relationship" with their American counterparts.

Stelmach said the western governors are very supportive of the corridor concept.
Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer declared the oilsands--the second-largest proven oil reserves in the world--are critically important to U. S. energy security and a major component for a powerhouse energy corridor.
"The most important energy corridor on the planet is no longer the Persian Gulf. It runs from the oilsands, Fort McMurray to Port Arthur, Texas," Schweitzer said.

"A large part of energy independence is going to be dependent upon developing the oilsands."
Colorado Governor Bill Ritter agreed, saying "it's both western parts of Canada and the United States that can play a role in energy independence."

Wall and Stelmach are scheduled to meet with U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu today :

"Chu has also lauded the potential of the oilsands, saying recently it’s an important piece of U.S. energy security.

Happy to oblige, I'm sure.

What's this Western Energy Corridor about again?

An Overview of the Western Energy Corridor Initiative

"The United States faces an unprecedented threat to its economic and national security due to its dependence on foreign oil and gas. Given this threat, the U.S. must secure and steward itsown domestic energy supplies more effectively.
The Office of Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves is proposing a major technical study under the auspices of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Section 369(i) to perform a regional analysis of the development potential of the Western Inland “Energy Corridor”.

~ Thomas Woods, Idaho National Laboratory - the U.S. Energy Department’s main nuclear laboratory

Last spring, the Alberta and US governments signed an agreement to jointly research the use of atomic power for tarsands development. The Alberta Research Council and the U.S. Energy Department’s main nuclear laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, announced they will collaborate on "the potential application of current and future nuclear energy technology".

So to recap :
~The US Dept of Energy funds their main nuclear laboratory, the INL, to come up with the Western Energy Corridor Initiative.
~Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba sign on to it via the Western Governors' Association.
~Alberta and US governments sign an agreement for future nuking of the tarsands via the INL and Alberta Research Council.
~Stelmach and Wall are meeting with the US Dept of Energy Secretary today.

I remember when we were just worrying about the NAFTA Superhighway.
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Harper's Nafta Superhighway

Once upon a time the NAFTA Superhighway/Trade Corridor was just a conspiracy theory.

Then it was a gleam in Manitoba Premier Gary Doer's eye. From his 2007 Speech from the Throne :

"Manitoba is also taking a major role in the development of a Mid-Continent Trade Corridor, connecting our northern Port of Churchill with trade markets throughout the central United States and Mexico. To advance the concept, an alliance has been built with business leaders and state and city governments spanning the entire length of the Corridor."

That alliance was the Ports-to-Plains Trade Corridor, a lobby group comprised of US and Canadian elected officials and business leaders, and SPP luminaries like Ron Covais, chair of the US end of the North American Competitiveness Council.

Later it showed up as a useful map on an Alberta government website - see above.

Now, according to the Government of Canada website, it's "a new job-creating investment contained in the Harper Government’s Economic Action Plan" :

"The CentrePort Canada initiative involves using the James Armstrong Richardson International Airport and surrounding land as a hub to import goods from Asia and Europe and then distributing those goods throughout North America by air, rail and road. The governments of Canada and Manitoba are jointly funding the next phase of this project, which involves building a high-speed transportation corridor.

It serves as a natural connection point between Atlantic shipping lanes and the Asia Pacific Gateway and as the northern terminus of the fast-growing mid-continent trade corridor, with the potential to expand to take advantage of trade opportunities in Canada’s North."

Sigh. They just don't make conspiracy theories like they used to.

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North America Next

A year ago the U.S. Department of Homeland Security gave Arizona State University $15 million to establish a Center of Excellence for Border Security and Immigration. The border security research centre is led by Rick Van Schoik, director of ASU’s North American Center for Transborder Studies.
Arizona State U presser, Feb. 2008 :

"The establishment of the center by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security follows more than two years of work assembling a team of U.S. universities, Mexican and Canadian institutions, government agencies, technology companies and national laboratories.

Research at the center will focus on new technologies such as surveillance, screening, data fusion and situational awareness using sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles and other technologies. The center will also provide research on population dynamics, immigration administration and enforcement, operational analysis, control and communications, immigration policy, civic integration and citizenship, border risk management and international governance."

Canadian advisors to NACTS include Former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada Anne McLellan and Christine Frechette, Director of the North American Forum on Integration, and York University and the University of Alberta, along with notable US deep integrationists Stephen Blank and Robert Pastor.

In their Feb 2009 policy paper "North America Next: A Report to President Obama on Building Sustainable Security and Competitiveness", they make eight recommendations calling for deeper integration, including :

• the inclusion of private sector and public-private P3 partnerships in meet-ups prior to the North American Trilateral Leaders’ Summits
• a National Security Council deputy to expand their "focus on traditional security to include law enforcement, commerce, transportation, environment, water, and regional development in the three countries"
• enhanced overall joint defense of North America which would allow Canada to continue responsibility for the Artic
• a joint revolving fund for infrastructure investments in North America
• a North American Greenhouse Gas Exchange Strategy to "ensure the United States continues to have priority access to Canada’s wealth of hydro-electricity, natural gas, light petroleum and uranium in exchange for offsets for the greenhouse gases created by their development"
• "moving the U.S.-Mexican and U.S.-Canadian borders (and their processing costs) away from the (actual) borders to the factories and farms from which trade goods originate", and
• "building and improving trade corridors like CANAMEX that go from northern Canada to southern Mexico".

The paper recommends less emphasis on "integration" and more on "plug and play interoperability".

Just keeping you up on the new North American language here.

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NAFTA Superhighway Saga continues...

Once upon a time it was called a mere myth, a conspiracy theory apparently believed only by paranoid nutters :

John Ibbitson, G&M, July 2007 :

"The so-called NAFTA superhighway - a massive, 12-lane road, rail and oil-and-gas corridor that would snake from western Mexico, through the United States and into Canada, making it far easier and cheaper to import Chinese goods, thus completing the final destruction of the American and Canadian manufacturing sectors.
Of course there is no NAFTA superhighway, and no plans to build one, any more than there is any serious talk of a North American Union. "

Why, even NASCO, the North American SuperCorridor Coalition Inc., and previously the biggest booster of the NAFTA Superhighway, says so. From their Facts and Myths page :

"There is no new proposed 'NAFTA Superhighway' : There are no plans to build a new NAFTA Superhighway - it exists today as I-35."

Also they tell us : no amero, no NAU, and especially nothing to do with the Trans Texas Corridor and its over blown rhetoric about a SuperCorridor from Canada to Mexico.

Apparently NASCO is just aiming to fix I-35 up a little. And to stop us from bothering them about it, they have taken down this map, which used to grace the frontpage of their website and scare the shit out of everybody :

Because nowadays the NAFTA Superhighway is just business-as-usual :

Craig Offman, Natty Post, Dec. 2007 :

"Number two on the popular US web site Digg is a map of the NAFTA Superhighway on an Alberta Government web site. [Picture at top] Why in the name of free trade are so many people freaked out about this thoroughfare?
Many believe the transcontinental corridor is a myth.....The Ministry of Infrastructure and Transportation web site uses the exact phrase, showing a thoroughfare that begins in Manitoba and drops all the way down to West Texas.
When initially reached for comment, ministry communications director Jerry Bellikka said, “Where’s the secret agenda if it’s on a government web site?" He added that the controversy is a “pretty good example of political rhetoric getting twisted out of shape.”
After some further investigation, Mr. Bellikka reports that the name in question has been on the site for five years and is used to help inform truckers of certain weight restrictions. "We don't see any link between trucking weights and conspiracy theories," he said."

I do hope you're keeping up here.

Six months ago the NAFTA Superhighway was a conspiracy theory but now it's been demoted to a useful tool on a government website.

The SPP = Jelly beans ; the NAFTA Superhighway = trucking weights.

Now if only Manitoba Premier and Hemispheria member Gary Doer would keep up.

Speech from the Throne, Nov. 20, 2007

"Manitoba is also taking a major role in the development of a Mid-Continent Trade Corridor, connecting our northern Port of Churchill with trade markets throughout the central United States and Mexico. To advance the concept, an alliance has been built with business leaders and state and city governments spanning the entire length of the Corridor. When fully developed, the trade route will incorporate an “in-land port” in Winnipeg with pre-clearance for international shipping."

Oh dear. What's he on about?

That would be this : [bold mine]

"On September 19-21, 2007 , the Ports-to-Plains Trade Corridor Coalition hosted the Great Plains International Conference 2007 at the Adam’s Mark Hotel in Denver, Colorado, gathering hundreds of elected and government officials, business leaders, communities and citizens from Laredo, Texas, and the Alberta-Montana border, to examine how to work together to secure the benefits of trade, promote energy security and strengthen trade linkages to western Canada, on behalf of the communities of the Great Plains, North America’s energy and agricultural heartland. The Colorado Department of Transportation and Texas Department of Transportation were co-hosts. 

Major events of the conference included: Texas Transportation Commissioner Fred Underwood announced TxDOT would develop financial master plan for the Ports-to-Plains project; Len Mitzel, a Member of Legislative Assembly of the Province of Alberta, Canada’s energy powerhouse and a potential candidate for Coalition membership, spoke on behalf of the Alberta Minister of Transportation, and invited Coalition leadership (including state officials) to Alberta for follow-up meetings. 

The Great Plains International Conference was the first formal gathering of three Congressionally-designated north-south High Priority Corridors that, together, form the primary trade corridor serving the states of the Great Plains: Ports-to-Plains (from Laredo to Denver); The Heartland Expressway (from Denver to Rapid City, South Dakota); and the Theodore Roosevelt Expressway (from Rapid City to the Canadian border provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan). 

Ron Covais, President of Lockheed Martin Americas, and U.S. Chair, North American Competitiveness Council, reported upon the recent Montebello Summit of the NAFTA heads of state, and the recent NACC report on the NAFTA Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP).Two post-9/11 realities dominate NACC activities, he said:
1) After 9/11, international business and homeland security are intertwined; and
2) North American business will increasingly grapple with intense competition from the “BRIC” nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China).
Under the circumstances, it is both necessary and appropriate to have the private sector on the front lines helping NAFTA governments to develop strategies for a secure, prosperous North America.The Great Plains conference helped to demonstrate that the Ports-to-Plains coalition has significant potential as a NAFTA-wide program, embracing interests from Coahuila to Alberta. Coalition staff and leadership have begun planning on next steps to more fully engage U.S. states and Canadian provinces on the northern end of the Great Plains region, particularly those at key connection points at the border, including Alberta, Saskatchewan and Montana."

(end of transcript)

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Ron Covais, the NACC, the Texas Superhighway model, talk of Alberta's oilsands, eager Canadian politicians from Alberta and Manitoba...doesn't look good, does it?

So far even they admit they don't have the money to pull it off.

Ports-to-Plains President Michael Reeves' boast of "together, we have secured over $270 million to develop, build and improve the Corridor in all 9 Coalition states" is a drop in the Superhighway superbucket.

But with eager beavers like Manitoba's Gary Doer and Alberta's Len Mitzel "who attended on behalf of Alberta Minister of Transportation Luke Ouellette" on board, they are at least a couple of drips closer.

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From only "a conspiracy myth" to just about "trucking weights" to a trans-border lobby group having the Trans Texas Corridor Commissioner develop a "financial master plan" for a North American Superhighway.

Have another look at that map at the very top again. It's from a Canadian government website.

Update : Politics 'n Poetry has the Prairie-to-Ports Gateway Map .

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