Pettigrew sees value in street protests
By MICHAEL VALPY
From Monday's Globe and Mail
Orillia, Ont. — The environmental movement is the only effective force left in the world capable of challenging global capitalism, International Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew told the annual Couchiching conference on public affairs Sunday.
"Left without a counterweight," he warned, "capitalism could easily destroy itself and damage the quality of life of people."
But at the same conference, two experts on global governance said neither the environmental movement nor the advocates of any other civil-society cause are making much headway against the power of global trade pacts.
Sylvia Ostry, a former deputy trade minister and now research fellow at the University of Toronto's Centre for International Studies, said there is no interest among governments in major systemic reform of the international order.
She said southern countries are dead set against even discussing what she termed "trade-and" subjects — meaning the inclusion of environmental protection, labour standards and similar issues in trade agreements. And they consider the advocates of these subjects to be neo-imperialists. Northern countries, meanwhile, are divided on the matter.
Elizabeth Dowdeswell, a Canadian management consultant and former executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, said although there are 500 international agreements on the environment, "in general we're not living up our commitments . . . despite wishful thinking, the environment is not in the mainstream."
This year's Couchiching conference was entitled Globalization and democracy: whose world is it? Mr. Pettigrew's address, which was the final speech to the conference, was confusing in parts.
He said the street protests at international summits are a symbol of momentous change in human affairs and represent the end of the old international order — the world of nation-states that has regulated humanity's affairs for 350 years.
He said most of the protesters have "very valid points, they have legitimate concerns and pertinent questions . . . and, after the downfall of all alternative, credible ideologies since 1989, capitalism does need to be challenged somehow."
Then he went on to dismiss most protesters as people merely opposed to globalization, who want to turn the clock back. "They seem to be driven by some kind of nostalgia . . . for what, I'm not sure — the epic class struggles of the past, the welfare state of the 1970s, for an idealized world that never existed."
He also said the protesters are imposing "limitations on political actors' capacity . . . to strengthen a system of rules-based trade and ensure that our new institutions like the WTO [World Trade Organization] remain effective and relevant."
Warren Allmand, president of Montreal's International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development and a former Liberal federal cabinet minister, went to a microphone after Mr. Pettigrew finished speaking and told the minister he had left a wrong impression about who the overwhelming majority of protesters are.
They are not blind opponents of globalization, Mr. Allmand said. In fact they welcome global governance as the necessary vehicle for putting in place global protections of the environment, democracy and labour.
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