North America confab 'undermines' democracy - Attendee of high-level meeting says officials wanted to hide it from public

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By Jerome R. Corsi, WorldNetDaily.com, September 21, 2006

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52074

A closed-door meeting of high-level government and business leaders that discussed the merger of North America was designed to subvert the democratic process, charged an attendee of the confab in Banff, Canada.

Mel Hurtig, a noted Canadian author and publisher who was the elected leader of the National Party of Canada, provided WND the agenda and attendee list of the North American Forum at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel in Banff, Alberta, Sept. 12-14.

Hurtig said the "secret meeting was designed to undermine the democratic process."

"What is sinister about this meeting is that it involved high level government officials and some of the top and most powerful business leaders of the three countries and the North American Forum in organizing the meeting intentionally did not inform the press in any of the three countries," he said. "It was clear that the intention was to keep this important meeting about integrating the three countries out of the public eye."...

The North American Forum consists of the three individuals who co-chaired the Banff meeting: George Schultz, former secretary of state under President Reagan; Canadian Peter Lougheed, the former Alberta premier and former leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta; and Mexico's Pedro Aspe, the former secretary of the Treasury of Mexico.

The North American Forum has no business office and no business address....

"The Canadian public has not been adequately informed about the on-going North American integration process, and we believe it is wrong for a meeting that involves top North American business executives and government officials to be held in secret behind closed doors," [Meera Karunananthan, spokeswoman for the Council of Canadians] said.

Jean-Yzes LeFort, also a spokesman for the Council of Canadians, told WND the group opposes the effort to create a North American Union because "the NAU represents an elite corporate agenda and to us what is being planned would be an unacceptable loss of sovereignty."

Attending the Banff meeting was Robert Pastor, the director of the Center for North American Studies at American University. Pastor is widely known for his extensive writings arguing for the creation of a North American Union, a new super-regional North American government based on the model of the European Union, with the intent of subrogating the sovereignty of the United States.

Pastor was co-chair of the Council of Foreign Relations task force that in May 2005 released a report entitled "Building a North American Community."...

In what is apparently intended to be an annual event, the first North American Forum meeting was held last September in Sonoma, Calif., and a meeting for next September is to be held in Mexico.

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