Monterrey, Mexico
Just as schoolkids get report cards, every year a group of movers and shakers gets together to review how the North American Free Trade Agreement is working.
They’re not the civil servants who actually hammer out treaty details, nor are they the politicians who jump on soapboxes during trade disputes. Instead, they’re thoughtful people who have roles in business, government and academia that bring them into daily contact with North American trade issues.
A 21-member Calgary delegation, including Mayor Dave Bronconnier and John Webb, chair of Calgary Technologies Inc., made the trip to Monterrey, Mexico, for this year’s Trilateral Technology Summit.
Bronconnier was enthusiastic about the conference and its potential. “As one of the founding partners of this movement, it’s vital for us to be here,” he said.
The hope is these three forward-thinking cities (Calgary, Monterrey and San Antonio, Tex.) can serve as a model for their countries to co-operate more closely in business, trade, education and even government.
Bronconnier also announced that the Trilateral Technology conference will return to Calgary in 2004, the place where it started in 2001. Former U.S. consul general Roy Chavera (now in Washington, D.C. as executive director, Oceans, Environment, Science and Technology, a branch of the U.S. government) also expressed pleasure that the event would be coming back to Calgary next year. Chavera was one of the driving forces in the initiation of the conference, drawing on personal relationships in San Antonio and Monterrey to make it happen.
The overall mood was one of optimism.
As the kick-off speaker, Fernando Elizondo Barragan, outgoing governor of the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon, put it, “NAFTA is working.”
He went on to express the opinion that, despite some hiccups, NAFTA has resulted in better standards in all three countries through “better living, better technology and a higher quality of life.”
His sentiments were echoed by Jose Gonzalez Paras, the new governor-elect for Nuevo Leon. “Nobody could have thought, at the end of World War Two, that Europe would be united as it is today,” he said. “And nobody could have imagined that countries so different as Canada, the U.S. and Mexico could be together in a free-trade agreement which would allow the free flow of goods, and that that agreement would open new routes for the development in our respective nations.”
He urged the several hundred delegates to take the next steps to take advantage of technological innovations to advance the competitiveness of the entire region.
Paras advocated a higher level of North American regional integration, noting that it has helped Europe continue to advance. “It’s not only economic relationships for new investments,” he said. “We should also incorporate other chapters such as co-operation and exchange in infrastructure, technology, social development, education and culture.”
But let’s not go too far – most of the participants felt that we should stop well short of the European model of integration.
“Nobody wants to see the kind of centralized power we see in Brussels,” declared Stephen Blank, professor at Pace University in New York.
However, we may actually be further along that path than we realize. Blank pointed to the $2.4 billion of trade that moves across the Canada-U.S. border every day, much of it in auto parts. This trade in auto components predates NAFTA’s 10-year history.
According to Blank, “NAFTA was the effort by three governments to bring regulations in line with what was already happening.” He went on to say that “this is not trade integration, it’s really structural integration.”
In other words, U.S. and Canadian companies make cars together, acting, for the most part, as if the border simply did not exist.
That’s fine, until something bad happens. We all remember the TV footage of the huge lines of trucks at border crossings after September 11, 2001. This is really bad news for an industry that has been trying to pretend the border doesn’t exist. As one speaker put it, a two-hour delay in a truck with vital parts getting across the border can put hundreds of people out of work. We simply cannot afford to let that happen.
Much of the conference was devoted to searching for ways to make our borders simultaneously more secure and efficient.
I spoke about some of the thorny issues relating to information, which has no passport and moves quite freely around the globe.
Julien De Schutter, vice-president of the Calgary Airport Authority, presented plans for automated clearance of people and goods and predicted that within a year, low-risk frequent travellers will be able to whisk through customs at the Calgary airport.
Vancouver airport launched the CANPASS system for its passengers in July, using a scan of your iris to confirm your identity. If you qualify, you can join up for $50 a year.
NAFTA still has its opponents, but there certainly wasn’t any picketing at the conference in Monterrey. Instead, there seemed to be a serious determination to make NAFTA work, without going the route of a creating a new agreement, the so-called NAFTA II.
In critiquing the conference, Earl Hickok, president of Calgary-based software maker Tecskor, said it was fine but there wasn’t enough opportunity for companies to get together and make deals.
He’ll have his chance to remedy that next year as the conference moves to Calgary.
Web watch:
www.nafta2020.com
(Tom Keenan, I.S.P., CISSP, is a professor at the University of Calgary and an internationally known expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
