The Canadian government banned imports of the toxic gasoline additive, MMT, when research indicated it might prove to be a human health hazard. However, under NAFTA, the U.S.-based Ethyl Corporation, producer of MMT, was able to sue the Canadian government for $350 million in lost profits. Rather than risk losing the case, the Canadian government spent $19.5 million of our tax dollars to pay Ethyl off!

In May, 1997, Kathy Cooper of the Canadian Environmental Law Association ( CELA) joined a 20-member Canadian delegation to Belo Horizonte, Brazil to attend the Our Americas Parallel Forum.. This non-government event was organized parallel to the government negotiations towards the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Kathy’s story is excerpted from CELA’s newsletter, The Intervenor.

"... Labour and civil society delegates from over 18 countries shared information on the human and environmental effects of free trade. Through a declaration and face-to-face meetings, delegates tried to make their presence and views known to those inside the FTAA talks. ... The declaration offered recommendations to the western hemisphere’s governments for making the process reflect principles of democracy, broad-based development and social justice and insisted that core labour and environmental protection standards be incorporated. ...

"But for the most part, the delegates from the Parallel Forum were shut out of the FTAA talks. Not so the business community which has held annual Business Forums since the 1994 Miami Summit of the Americas. Fortune 500 executives regularly address the ministers. Indeed, parts of the business meeting during this round of FTAA talks took place in the same location, under the same tight security, as the governmental meetings.

"The meetings occurred in Belo Horizonte’s modern city hall located in a large and beautiful municipal park. Locked up and guarded for the meetings, the park sits across a river and about a city block away from a cultural centre – the Palacio das Artes. To bridge this distance, a ludicrous catwalk was constructed allowing the ministers and corporate types to walk over the park fence, over the river (really a concrete-lined open sewer) and 10 metres above the city streets to get to the cultural events laid on for them at the Palacio des Artes. If the park gate had been open, the walk would have been just as simple – and quicker – along the city streets.

"For me the catwalk, suspended 10 metres above the stark reality of Brazil, allowing the government officials to keep a privileged distance from the frequent evidence of intense poverty and aging infrastructure at street level, symbolized the yawning gulf between the free traders who rule us and reality of the Americas. They must not be left alone to decide our futures.