If you missed the news coverage of the August 20-21 North American Leaders’ Summit in Montebello, Canada, there’s a fairly simple reason: there wasn’t any coverage. Certainly nothing of any length or substance. While President Bush, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper met behind closed doors at Le Chateau Montebello resort with corporate and academic elites to advance the Security and Prosperity Partnership plan for political and economic merger of the three countries, the U.S. “prestige” media were busy with more important stories, such as NFL bad boy Michael Vick’s dog-abuse charges and the umpteen-hundredth debauchery update on delinquent pop divas Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Britney Spears. Gotta have round-the-clock coverage of those hot, earth-shaking stories!

Now, if you were in Canada, the story was somewhat different. There, the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) summit was very big news. The problem was that Canada’s big media got it all wrong. Which isn’t surprising, since, in this case, Canada’s big media — like the U.S. big media — is in bed with the folks they’re covering. Only a few select journalists were allowed inside the security perimeter of riot police, military, and Secret Service. And they seemed mostly content to regurgitate the press releases and talking points handed to them by the summiteers. Meanwhile, the rest of us in the press corps were relegated to the area outside the street barricades, where the only stories were the antics of the loony left protesters, and the tear-gas response from the police. This is what the SPP advocates really mean when they speak of “transparency” and their commitment to “openness and accountability”!

So, you have the situation where Prime Minister Harper dismisses genuine concerns about the threats posed by the SPP agenda to national sovereignty and independence with an offhand satirical remark, and virtually all of the media mavens echo his ludicrous comment as though it is the final, unanswerable response to opponents of the SPP.

“Is the sovereignty of Canada going to fall apart if we standardize the jellybeans? Maybe Mr. Dion thinks so,” Mr. Harper said, referring to Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion’s opposition to the SPP. “But I don’t think so.” Yes, folks, you needn’t worry; you needn’t listen to all the wild warnings of the SPP naysayers. These summits aren’t about anything more serious than jellybeans! What a relief!

Thus, Mr. David Ganong became the poster boy for the Montebello summit. Mr. Ganong, a leading producer of jellybeans in Canada, is upset because the differences in labeling requirements between Canada and the United States is raising his costs and reducing his ability to compete in the United States.

“The killer is nutritional labeling,” reported Canada’s Globe and Mail, “which varies in such things as the width of the wording … and even the assumption of serving sizes.”

Now, that’s a righteous fit of pique any over-regulated businessman can identify with. That was the theme of Richard Foot’s August 19 piece for CanWest News Service titled “Montebello meeting really no big deal.” According to Mr. Foot, the meeting was merely about “regulations over food-colour dyes, common standards for hazardous materials containers, navigation systems for North American airways,” etc. Likewise, the Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson heaped ridicule on “conspiracy theories of the extreme left or the paranoid right” that threaten SPP efforts at “making things simpler.”

But is that what the SPP is really all about, freeing us from bureaucratic regulation? Unfortunately, that is not the SPP’s goal. In fact, it is quite the opposite. According to Professor Robert Pastor, the “father” of the SPP, the partnership is really about “continental integration” and building a “North American Community” patterned after the European Union. Another SPP architect (and close friend of Pastor), former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda, boasts that the SPP process is “a metaphor of Gulliver, of ensnaring the giant.” Castaneda, a longtime communist, sees the SPP as an efficient means of tying up the giant — the United States — “with thread, with 20,000 nets that bog it down: these nets being norms, principles, resolutions, regulations, and bilateral, regional, and international covenants.”

For the past two years, since the SPP’s 2005 launch at the Waco, Texas, summit, 20 working groups composed of hundreds of officials and corporate and academic elites have been working in secret creating these Lilliputian snares for policies covering over 300 areas of concern, from immigration and transportation to infrastructure and agriculture — and, yes, jellybeans. It is time for Congress to demand that the administration demonstrate genuine transparency by releasing the documents of the SPP working groups and SPP meetings.

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