Sign up to receive SPP updates:
RSS feed.  |
ABOUT THE SPP | BACKGROUNDERS | MEDIA | VIDEO/AUDIO |
SPP resources SPP Summit - New Orleans SPP Summit - Montebello Teach-in |
February 21, 2008 Do you get the Colorado Springs Gazette? Didn’t think so, but it was the only way you would have found out about a new military agreement Canada signed with the United States last week. According to the lone article in the Gazette, which the Canadian Embassy in Washington sent out to expats in the U.S. via its Canada 2 Connect news service, the Civil Assistance Plan, “allows the military from one nation to support the armed forces of the other nation… during floods, forest fires, hurricanes, earthquakes and effects of a terrorist attack.” Where was the Canadian Forces press release? An official at Canada Command told us the order from on high was not to release one, although they couldn’t explain why. Says Air Force General Gene Renuart, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and Northern Command based at Peterson Air Force Base, in a February 15th NORTHCOM release, “This document is a unique, bilateral military plan to align our respective national military plans to respond quickly to the other nation’s requests for military support of civil authorities.” Renuart continues: “Unity of effort during bilateral support for civil support operations such as floods, forest fires, hurricanes, earthquakes and effects of a terrorist attack, in order to save lives, prevent human suffering and mitigate damage to property, is of the highest importance, and we need to be able to have forces that are flexible and adaptive to support rapid decision-making in a collaborative environment.” This military agreement between NORTHCOM and CANADA COMMAND appears to complement the emergency preparedness components of the North American Plan for Avian and Pandemic Influenza, announced last August at the completion of the Security and Prosperity Partnership “leaders summit” in Montebello. As CLC researcher Teresa Healy said in her report on the Montebello summit: “The pandemic preparedness strategy is the mechanism through which a North American emergency management infrastructure will be set in place. [It] is the public face of preparations for tri-national emergency planning as well as the ongoing protection of critical infrastructure.” (Emphasis hers.) Canada and the U.S. have been developing the Civil Assistance Plan through the Bi-National Planning Group (BNP) since 2004, according to the Department of National Defence. As Steven Staples of the Rideau Institute wrote in his contribution to the CCPA book Whose Canada?, the BNP was established within NORAD shortly after December 2002, when "the Canadian government instructed the military to enter into talks with its U.S. counterparts to discuss the means by which Canadian military forces could more closely 'cooperate' with Northern Command, thus satisfying NORTHCOM's requirement to incorporate Canada into its area of responsibility." Part of the BNP's mandate, which expired in early 2006, was "to draft plans detailing how each country's military could assist the other in times of domestic emergencies, such as a terrorist attack near the Canada-U.S. border," wrote Staples. Military cooperation between the two countries isn’t new but it is ironic that while Canadians are told through government ad campaigns to “get prepared” for a 72-hour emergency, we are given literally no notice of a new military pact before it is signed. And we are still waiting to hear about it from a Canadian source more than 72 hours later. To read the final report and recommendations of the Bi-National Planning Group, click here.
|
|||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
 |
NACC
Workers
Water
Energy
Security & civil liberties
Safety & regulations
Transportation corridors
