Crossing the Line: Canada and Free Trade with Mexico

Edelgard E. Mahant is a political sciences professor at Laurentian
University.

Since the 1988 federal election, the free trade debate in Canada has
remained polarized. It is scarcely possible to find a book or other
publication that is not clearly aligned on one side or the other. This
book is from the “against” camp. It consists of more than 20 short
articles by a number of American, Canadian, and Mexican opponents of
NAFTA. Though trade unionists make up the largest single group of
contributors, there are also articles by social activists, journalists,
and academics.

The book is divided into three parts: the first two deal with the
economic and social (wages, the environment, and medicare, for example)
effects of free trade, whereas the third presents advice on how to
oppose NAFTA, as well as suggestions for alternatives to the FTA and
NAFTA. Although they are one-sided, the articles are almost uniformly
informative. There are charts on wage levels and trade statistics,
illustrative quotations in the wide margins, and many photographs.

A few articles are especially edifying. Marjorie Cohen contributes a
brief and very comprehensible piece on the effects of free trade on the
Canadian economy. Alejandro Alvarez and Gabriel Mendoza are equally
informative in their piece on the deepening poverty of the Mexican
people. Jim Sinclair describes and explains the growth of the
maquiladoras zone. Tony Clarke presents an alternative to NAFTA in the
form of a “continental development pact” that would protect all the
good causes—labor, the environment, democracy—and do so on a North
American scale.

The articles are annoyingly interlaced with one another, so that all of
one article may appear on the bottom half of the two or three pages in
which another article is printed. This is confusing and breaks the
reader’s train of thought. The publisher would be well advised to use
narrower pages, making the book easier to hold, and to print one article
at a time.