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Redefining Atlantic Canada in the Corporate Image 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.” NPT Conference Ends in Failure: Diplomatic Disaster Opens Nuclear Trap-Door 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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