"On va protester et bla bla bla," as our Prime Minister put it in his usual tactful manner. But what else would you expect him to say? He's the boss. He puts pepper on his plate. He'll just fence out the rabble, and bring back APEC's Sergeant Pepper to handle crowd control again, and sell some corporate sponsorships to banks to help defray expenses. You got a problem with that?
Jean Chrétien (once a youthful protester himself) isn't the first middle-aged man afflicted with generational amnesia. Our editorial pages are full of them. These men assure us that the people outside the free-trade fence are idiots, cranks, and naive sons and daughters of privilege.
Personally, I'm a free-trader down to the soles of my imported footwear. But my heart is on the streets. Anyone who wants to argue there's a higher purpose to Western civilization than making the world safe for Nike and McDonald's is okay with me.
The free-trade protests in Quebec are only partly about brackets and subclauses, Chapter 11, and all that other nearly incomprehensible arcana.
They are really about trying to claim a space for values that sometimes seem to have no place in a world where Western-style capitalism is utterly triumphant, where local control is slipping away, where the fruits of freedom are defined as all the branded shoes and junk food you can consume. Where liberation is a chain of golden arches in every nation, and every nation is just another potential target market.
Those kids are right about some other things, too. Free trade has costs and it has losers. The absolutist rhetoric of free trade's champions obscures some dirty little secrets. In this game, there are no nice guys, only competing interests. Capital is more mobile than people, so today's job can be gone by tomorrow.
Progress shuts out some people, and for plenty of others it is bittersweet.
"Free trade has become a fickle friend," said the CBC's Laura Lynch in her excellent radio report the other night. "Demanding, difficult, and lacking in loyalty."
To get her story, she visited Mexico's maquiladoras,the export-processing zones full of economic migrants from the south. "In terms of work, it's better here," one young worker told her. "But, in almost every other way, life is better back home."
In Ciudad Juarez, people live in tin and cardboard shacks. There's no running water, but everyone has a job and everyone eats. Between shifts, the parents swap their children back and forth. "I like being here. I can feed my baby," one young mother said. "I live too far away from my mother."
The city where she lives is plagued by rapes and drugs, and everyone's family is too far away. The price of prosperity is cultural meltdown.
Free-traders are right when they say that sweatshop wages are better than no wages at all. But the campus protests of privileged First World kids have done some good. Even Nike, the archenemy of the antisweatshop movement, has at last agreed to labour-monitoring of its Third World factories. These days, as Naomi Klein so nicely puts it, no brand can afford to let its production secrets crash into its market image.
The protesters are right about some other things, too. The deals we've struck, and those we are about to strike, are very complex arrangements with unpredictable outcomes and some rude shocks. Who knew that UPS would launch a lawsuit because it doesn't like the way we operate Canada Post? Who knows who's next?
Never underestimate naive and privileged college kids. Sometimes, their values trickle up to boardrooms.
Eons ago, even I flashed the peace sign and marched against the military-industrial complex. It was fun. It seemed to be important, far more important than my final exams, even though Lyndon Johnson said it was just a bunch of blah blah blah.
My middle-aged friends tell me there's no comparison, because we were right and the people on the streets of Quebec are wrong. Maybe so. But which kids are more interesting? The ones who like the world just the way it is and only want a Beemer and their piece of it? The ones so cynical they'd rather stay in bed? Or the ones who have some passion to make the world a better place than their parents have?
Meantime, don't be too complacent about the triumph of globalization. Privately, even our own business leaders are worried about how fast our local control is disappearing. That giant sucking sound you hear is Canadian-owned companies being swallowed up by the global economy. Our northern peso has turned our country into a giant bargain basement with cheap assets for sale. Soon, even more of our head offices will be somewhere else.
Your kids may be going, too. Lots of kids of folks I know are leaving town to work as lawyers in New York or doctors in Texas or filmmakers in Los Angeles. They're economic migrants, too -- just more upscale and far more prosperous than the ones in Mexico. Their mothers and fathers are happy for them. But it's a bittersweet farewell.
Copyright © 2001 Globe Interactive
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