Keystone XL Pipeline Delay: Were Fears Of A ‘North American Union' Behind Opposition?

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/11/14/keystone-xl-north-american-union-nafta-superhighway_n_1093127.html?ref=canada-business

The Obama administration’s decision to delay the Keystone pipeline has been largely painted in the media as a victory for the environmental movement.

Yet the notion that environmentalists scuttled this deal doesn’t entirely square with the facts. Progressive-minded celebrities were arrested outside the White House in anti-Keystone protests, sure, but in the actual halls of power the story played out very differently.

One of these issues is property rights. ... Nothing could strike a more unwelcome chord with today’s libertarian-minded rural American conservative. The idea that a company -- and a foreign company, at that -- could come to people’s homes and demand that they sell their property to them under threat of lawsuit flies in the face of what they see as the foundations of America’s constitutional order. The spectre of a large, unaccountable Canadian company taking homeowners’ land against their will in order to build a pipeline for Canadian oil is enough to spark a revolution in today’s bloody-minded, Tea Party-dominated conservative movement.

But beyond the controversy over property rights lies another concern, one which may not be articulated by elected politicians in the deep-red rural Midwest, but one that appears in private conversations, in the comments sections of online articles, and on the discussion boards where grassroots conservative debate takes place. And that fear is the North American Union.

It has been a concern (some would say a conspiracy theory) of U.S. conservatives that the North American Free Trade Agreement is the thin end of the wedge to the creation of a North American Union, our very own version of the European Union, complete with mountains of technocratic regulations, soul-sucking bureaucracy and an accompanying loss of sovereignty that would make the United States a subservient element of a new, super-national entity.

(It’s an interesting irony to note that while in Canada the fear of losing sovereignty through economic integration has been the domain of progressives, in the U.S. that exact same fear is primarily held by conservative-leaning individuals.)


MAP OF THE PROPOSED KEYSTONE.....MAP OF THE SO-CALLED 'NAFTA SUPER-HIGHWAY'
XL PIPELINE EXPANSION

If it gets people fighting for the right thing, I don't care if they think a talking cabbage told them to fight.