SAN ANTONIO, TEX.

Presidential candidate H. Ross Perot predicted it would bring “a great sucking sound” of jobs leaving the U.S.A.
But 10 years after the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed, the only sucking was on Budweisers and Coronas as 458 free-trade fans, including a bunch of Albertans, gathered here last week to ask: “What’s next?”

The occasion was the Trilateral Technology Summit held in San Antonio, the place where U.S. President George Bush, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney inked the NAFTA accord in 1992.

I got to be there in 2002, amid the mayors and
business heavyweights, because right now the thing that’s on everybody’s mind is infrastructure protection.

As a computer security expert, I know a bit about that.
In fact, worries about secure border crossings and techno attacks on electricity grids are threatening to
scuttle cross-border traffic in ways that Ross Perot couldn’t even imagine.

The buzz from everyone on the podium was certainly that NAFTA has brought more jobs, generally higher wages and a great increase in cross-border trade and investment.

There was a lot of regional horn-blowing.

“Trade is increasingly becoming city-to-city,” said Calgary’s Mayor Dave Bronconnier, up there with the mayors of San Antonio and Monterrey, Mexico. “It’s really the strength of our three cities that we continue to build upon.”

The first Trilateral Technology Summit was held in Calgary last September, and a number of those attending became unexpected extended guests of Canada as the events of Sept. 11 prevented them from getting back to the U.S. and Mexico. Next year’s event will be in Monterrey.

Calgary’s Douglas Mitchell, QC, former CFL commissioner and national co-chairman of Borden Ladner Gervais, reminded us that a recent KPMG study ranked Alberta as the most cost-competitive location to establish a business, especially in the knowledge-intensive industries.

San Antonio’s business development people were swarming at almost every event. It was hard to have a quiet drink or a bite to eat without learning how their city is becoming a hub of biomedical research, a world-class military research centre and a unique tourist mecca.

And there was no end of Mexican entrepreneurs earnestly looking for business partners north of the Rio Grande AND north of the 49th parallel.

San Antonio is home base to telecom giant SBC Communications Inc., so it was fitting that SBC’s
president and former U.S. Secretary of Commerce, William M. Daley, gave a keynote speech.

He crowed that “NAFTA’s success is a great study in how a good policy can make positive changes in the lives of people.” But he also admitted that the telecom industry “is a leading contributor to the nation’s economic problems,” and things are not very rosy right now.

As if to bear out his statement, the day after the summit ended, SBC announced that it would be cutting its workforce by 20,000 people in the next few months. No amount of free-trade happy talk can overcome the bitter current realities of the high-tech sector.

A major focus of the conference was overcoming threats to the basic infrastructure that makes business, and in fact, everyday life, possible.

The U.S. Air Intelligence Agency is headquartered at nearby Lackland Air Force Base. In a unique public/private partnership, it is working with the University of Texas at San Antonio and other public agencies to find out how much they can trust their local
infrastructure.

In a simulation exercise held a few weeks ago, they formed crisis teams to respond to mock emergencies such as a credible threat by computer hackers to sabotage the Texas power grid.

Rather than just speculate on how this might play out, they had the real experts from the local power company in the room to respond. They also let the media watch.

A live exercise is planned for next spring, but they’d have to kill us if they told us much more about that.
In keeping with the idea of educating the next generation, more than 100 high school and college
students were invited to the Technology Summit sessions.

Most were expecting a conference that focused more on technology and less on business and public policy.

What they really got was a day off school.

At my own table, as Microsoft’s education speaker Sherri Bealkowski went on about how Bill Gates will save our kids, the real kids were plotting the destruction of a website that displays roller coaster pictures.

“The webmaster is a jerk,” said one of these high school students. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I run one of the rides at the Six Flags theme park and this guy is just ignorant.”

When I asked him if he knew of any serious high-tech infrastructure vulnerabilities, he explained, in loving detail, how he could make two of the roller coaster trains collide, causing, he said, “not a lot of death, but a lot of injury.”

Much of the credit for the big Canadian contingent at this conference goes to Roy E. Chavera, the energetic U.S. consul general here in Calgary. In many ways this event is his brainchild, and he has been a tireless promoter of it and of better U.S./Canada/Mexico relations.

There is a great logic to NAFTA trade, from compatible time zones to roughly similar legal and banking
systems. Almost everybody I talked to made some interesting contacts over the three-day conference.

Now, our challenge is to follow up on them. That is, of course, if critical infrastructure such as the phone system, electrical grid and e-mail servers continue to co-operate.

(Dr. Tom Keenan is Dean of Continuing Education at the University of Calgary.)