To have my position on FTAA, read carefully again what Owlkak said, and specificly his fouth and fifth point. For the lost of autonomy of govenements, check the FTAA chapter on Investment at wtowatch. Also, keep in mind that these texts remains officially unpublic. They were secret, and then finally they accpept to publish them, but AFTER the summit, pretexting that they were not translated in french and portugese yet!!! As an activist said, we would have take them in chinese, these texts.

So our goverments were about to negociate in secret a Free trade agreement that was not known from the public, behind a 4 km wall. Something was wrong...

Being agaist FTAA is not being for closed borders or against "globalisation", whatever this word means. It's just refusing that investors and businessmen makes the law in our countries. Refusing to sell our public education, health care, culture industries, natural ressources and even our water, to private industries. Refusing to accept to be judge by another law court in another country. That's why we protest. This will not happen.

We protested under the banner "Another world is possible", and we hope that this mobilisation will bring another continental solidarity. For more information, please check this out.

And for the police... All the gas they shoot was clearly an attempt to shut down the protest, and not to arrest the so-called "trouble makers", who remains mostly in liberty. There was several thousands peacefully demonstrators who saw their freedom of speech bullied. A friend of mine did a sit-in in the street yesterday, with maybe a hundred peoples, including the NDP deputy Svend Robinson. They were shouting "La police, assis!" ("policemen, sit down"!!), and they were keeping away "trouble makers". Despite of that, after a certain time, the police finally gas them, and my friend been injuried by a rubber ammunition. He is ok, but it's absolutely incredible - they gased a deputy!! This is shamefull. I don't know what's going on actually, but I guess it might be calm, cause people, including me, are tired, and the weather is not so good. But I still hear the helicopters as I'm typing this.

Tomorrow it will be finished, and my old city will return to it's calm and quiet peace. But the work will remains. People's Summit challenge governments to hold a continental Referendum about the FTAA, and they're talking about a day of strike for the First oy may 2002. Stay tuned!

Simon-Pierre
Je pense donc je nuis