The allegory of the three agent provocateurs

Photo: LeDaro. See animated version here.



Is it possible that these three unidentified agent provocateurs at the Montebello Summit are simply an allegory of the summit itself and the three “leaders” who convened it? Bush, Calderon and Harper.

Like the masked men themselves, do we really know who these three “leaders” are and their true intent with the power that they hold in their hands? They fashion themselves as the three amigos, as if to signal friendliness. Friendliness to whom? We know that they had considerable time to listen to the innermost thoughts of the 10 CEOs that they had each selected to sit on the NACC. Apart from the facile jelly bean agenda of David Ganong, little is known about how these 30 CEOs are going to improve life for the other 500 million residents of North America who were devoid of representation. I understand that David Ganong thinks all our problems will be solved if only he could ship his jelly beans in one standardized printed package to the US. Does this universal packaging concept of his contemplate dropping  the French language requirements under Canadian packaging standards?  It’s far from certain whether US consumers of his jelly beans would appreciate their new French language packaging in the new Freedom Fry country called the US of A, which is the Bush mandated politically correct name for what the rest of the world calls French fries and the US did too before Chirac didn’t see fit to join Bush to rid Iraq of its cache of non existent WMD and replace it with a cache of otherwise non existent IEDs.

If not, I guess that means the universal packaging initiative proposed by David Ganong contemplated moving to a trilingual standard to also include Spanish. Or did his thinking not go that far? How far did his thinking go beyond the confines of his own jelly bean manufacturing facility? What will his “solution” mean for the $6.3 billion (as of 2002) packaging industry in Canada who profitably exist in this country primarily because of the (relatively) low volume runs that they provide under Canada’s bilingual packaging standards? No doubt these offsetting concerns were being fully dealt with by others on the NACC. Perhaps Manulife CEO  Dominic D’Alessandro knows a lot about the packaging industry since he launched one of the most successful packaged products in Canada during the last year by the name of Income Plus, with a little help from the unforeseen (at least by those in the public) tax measures to tax income trusts. If not, we can be well assured that the CEO of Home Depot Canada knows what’s best for Canadians, which is no doubt the only reason why Stephen Harper made room for her on the NACC.

Unfortunately very little else is known about the Summit itself except for the jelly bean communique and the allegory provided by the three masked agent provocateurs.

Perhaps it isn’t an allegory, but rather an unfortunate annoyance, this agent provocateur thing, who some in the press have aptly called the Three Stooges

The unfortunate aspect of that is that the Three Amigos and their jelly bean agenda may have been totally undermined by the Three Stooges, in which case  the SPP Summit at Montebello will unfortunately be forever known as the Subversion of Police Protocols.

Or maybe none of this occurred by accident, and these Three Stooges tactics were condoned by those staging the summit and the architects of SPP, in which case the summit is deserving of being known as the Subversion of Parliamentary Procedures since the SPP has been methodically set up in such a way so as to avoid parliamentary oversight. Just ask the architects themselves. While you’re at it, ask them just exactly what they meant when they said their overall operating tactic for the SPP will be one of "evolution by stealth".

Doesn't sound very security or prosperity-like to me. But that’s for the other 500 milion not represented at the summit to fuss about, or as I pointed out in an earlier e-mail, let them eat pesticides, as we march down the road called the lowest common denominator in search of the holy grail of corporate profitability and the further concentration of power amongst the corporate elite. The proverbial bottom line of SPP. Phooey to that.