OTTAWA (CCN) -- According to Canada's foreign affairs department.


OTTAWA (CCN) -- According to Canada's foreign affairs department, the legacy of the 10 year of advanced age North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is undivided of economic growth and rising standards of living for populace in Canada, the United States and Mexico.

yet there are many in the three countries who strenuously disagree with this "verdict," including speakers at a public forum in Ottawa, race 21 sponsored by Common Frontiers ,an organization made up of human rights, labor, humanitarian and body of christians organizations, including KAIROS: Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives.

"Since the signing of the first trade agreement, we have created Third World in Canada", said Maude Barlow, national chair of the Council of Canadians. "We have had the largest rise in child neediness in the industrial world. Gone are family allowance, the Canada Assistance Plan, which was the national standard for social assistance, and the standards forward unemployment insurance."

Barlow also told the gathering that Canada's health care method has been under assault the one and the other from under-funding--"which is the massive right-wing push to expiration what's left of our health care system"--and public-private health care partnerships.



In Mexico, large corporations have been the real beneficiaries of NAFTA, said Alejandro Villamar Calderon, a founding member of the Hemispheric Social Alliance (H.S.A.), and a noted analyst of liberated trade negotiations and agreements.

"Everybody knows there is more and more inequality, not simply in Mexico but also within our three countries," he said.

Productivity has increased in Mexico, on the other hand salaries have decreased, he said. "The social fabric has been deteriorating from beginning to end these years," said Villamar. Calling it a "paradox," he said the main resource in Mexico is riches sent by Mexicans working in Canada and the U "Officially those totalitys total $40 billion a year moreover the national migrants' organization believe that the sum total is twice as much," he said.

"In fact, there is more standard of value coming into Mexico from the Mexican workers outside the fatherland than from the revenue from oil exported through his country," Villamar said. "So the 'success' of NAFTA is that it has been exporting manpower," he said. "Now we have a abiding habitation that lives from the salaries from those workers who have been exported."

Noting the upcoming presidential elections in her abiding habitation Alexandra Spieldoch, of the United States, told the dispose "It's absolutely imperative to obtain President Bush out of office." She added, "We can't afford another four years; neither can the NAFTA countries and neither can the quiet of the world."

"Americans were promised that NAFTA would create piece of works in the U.S. and that it was going to be a great bountiful for the job industry," she said. "But actually there's been almost 25 million work at jobss lost in the manufacturing sector alone."

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

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