In his State of the Union address, President Bush laid out his government’s goals. The third goal was “to promote energy independence for our country”. Mexico, Canada’s other NAFTA partner, also has a policy of oil energy independence and Mexican public ownership. Canadians seem blissfully unaware that while our NAFTA partners are looking after their own energy security, Canada is the only NAFTA country, prevented from doing so by the energy exporting provisions in NAFTA.
Gordon Laxer is the Co-Director of Parkland Institute, a non-corporate, research network at the University of Alberta. Parkland is a highly visible institute in Alberta’s heartland, that the Globe and Mail once called Alberta’s ‘unofficial opposition’. Gordon is Parkland’s founding Director. He was The Director from 1996 to June 2011.
He is a Political Economy professor and has published over 34 journal articles and book chapters. Gordon is author or editor of five books, including Open for Business: The Roots of Foreign Ownership in Canada, which received the 1992 John Porter Award from the Canadian Sociology Association for best book written about Canada. Gordon was the Principal Investigator of a 6-year, $1.9 million research project: Neoliberal Globalism and its Challengers: Reclaiming the Commons in the Semi-periphery, the comparative Study of Canada, Australia, Mexico and Norway.
