Redefining
Atlantic Canada in the Corporate Image
By Garry Leech
Imagine a unified region consisting of Canada’s
Atlantic Provinces and the northeastern United States in which
provincial and state legislation eliminated the minimum wage,
restricted the ability of workers to organize and drastically
reduced public spending on social programs. If two organizations
based on either side of the US-Canada border get their way, this
vision would constitute the future of the region they call Atlantica,
or the International Northeast Economic Region. The Atlantica
Initiative is intended to benefit big business on both sides of
the border and is being spearheaded by the Halifax-based Atlantic
Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) and the Eastern Maine Development
Corporation. As AIMS has boldly stated: “If the border cannot
be made to disappear, its impact must at least be blurred.”
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NPT Conference Ends in Failure:
Diplomatic Disaster Opens Nuclear Trap-Door
By Sean Howard
Writing for this website in mid-March (‘Nuclear
Disaster or Nuclear Disarmament? Decision Time for an Endangered
World’), I previewed the slim hopes for progress, and rich
potential for deadlock, at a crucial upcoming meeting (May 2-27)
of the 188-state nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Despite
the impassioned exhortations of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan,
echoed by a large number of angry and frustrated delegates, the
conference proved, as Canadian journalist and author Gwynne Dyer
noted on May 31, an almighty “mess” achieving “absolutely
nothing.”
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