Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)

Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)

APEC is an organization that aims to promote free trade and economic cooperation throughout the Asia Pacific region. It was created in 1989 because of the growing interdependence of Asia-Pacific economies and the establishment of regional economic blocs such as the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

APEC intends to improve living standards and education levels through sustainable economic growth and to promote a sense of community and an appreciation of common values among Asia-Pacific countries. APEC’s membership includes 21 states, called “member economies.”

Of these, 12 are founding members—Australia, Brunei, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and the United States— while Chile, China, Hong Kong, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Russia, Taiwan, and Vietnam joined at a later phase. APEC has no treaty obligations of its participants.


Decisions made within APEC are reached by consensus, and commitments are undertaken on a voluntary basis. APEC’s membership accounts for approximately 40 percent of the world’s population, approximately 56 percent of world GDP, and about 48 percent of world trade.

The first APEC Leaders’ Meeting occurred in 1993 and was organized by Bill Clinton in Blake Island, Washington. At its 1994 summit meeting in Bogor, Indonesia, APEC set an ambitious schedule to achieve free trade and raise the level of investments throughout the Asia-Pacific region by 2010 for members with developed economies and by 2020 for members with developing ones.

The Osaka Action Agenda was adopted a year later and was designed to implement APEC’s goals of liberalizing trade and investment, facilitating business activities, and promoting economic and technical cooperation. The procedure that all APEC’s decisions had to be taken by consensus and preferably passed unanimously limited the effectiveness of APEC.

In addition, although decisions can be taken in the absence of unanimity, they are not legally binding on member governments. In 1997 at the annual summit in Vancouver, Canada, police forces violently clashed with demonstrators objecting to the presence of Indonesian president Suharto.

APEC is organized into numerous committees, special task commissions, working groups, and a business advisory council. The committees meet twice per year. The working groups are led by experts and consider specific issues, including energy, tourism, fishing, transportation, and telecommunications.

Every year one of the member economies hosts an economic leaders’ meeting, selected ministerial meetings, senior officials meetings, the APEC Business Advisory Council and the APEC Study Centres Consortium, and also fills the executive director position at the APEC secretariat.

The deputy executive director changes every year, as the position is given to a senior diplomat of the country who will be the APEC chair the following year. The APEC secretariat, established in 1993 and based in Singapore, provides coordination as well as technical and advisory support for all the organization’s initiatives.

Canada After 1950

Canada After 1950

Since the mid-20th century Canada has been a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary democracy with a federal system of parliamentary government. Canada’s constitution governs the legal framework of the country and consists of written text and unwritten traditions and conventions.

Until November 1981 Canada’s government retained strong ties to the British parliament; the Canadian constitution could only be amended by an act of Great Britain’s parliament. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s negotiations between the provinces and the federal government that were designed to patriate the constitution and provide an amending procedure were unsuccessful. These negotiations between the federal government and the English-speaking provinces finally bore fruit in 1981, giving Canada full amendment powers over its own constitution.

Prior to this, Queen Elizabeth II of England had been the chief of state, and despite the patriation of the constitution, ties between Canada and the Commonwealth of Nations remain close. On September 27, 2005, Michaëlle Jean was appointed by the queen, on the advice of the prime minister, as governor-general of Canada for a five-year term.


In February 2006 Stephen Harper became prime minister. This position belongs to the leader of the political party that can obtain the confidence of a majority in the House of Commons, whose members are elected by the citizens by simple plurality in one electoral district. General elections are called by the governor-general when the prime minister so advises, and must occur every five years or less.

Ever since its founding, Canada has had two official languages, English and French, which are the mother tongues of 56 percent and 28 percent of the population, respectively. On July 7, 1969, the Official Languages Act was proclaimed, and French was made commensurate to English throughout the federal government. This started a process that led to Canada’s redefining itself as a “bilingual” nation. French is mostly spoken in Quebec province, parts of New Brunswick, eastern and northern Ontario, Saskatchewan, the south of Nova Scotia, and the southern Manitoba province. Several aboriginal languages also have official status in the Northwest Territories. Inuktitut is the majority language in Nunavut and has official status there.

Since the mid-20th century religion patterns have not changed much. They changed with the arrival of new immigrants, as they did during the country’s early days. Seventy-seven percent of Canadians identify themselves as Christians, and of that Catholics make up the largest group (43 percent). The largest Protestant denomination is the United Church of Canada; about 17 percent of Canadians have no religious affiliation; and the remaining 6 or 7 percent practice religions other than Christianity.

Canada’s entertainment industry grew alongside the United States’s leading film and music industry, having had a quick development during the 1950s and 1960s, but the most rapid development after the 1990s. For decades the Canadian film market was dominated by the American film industry, but then Canadians developed a vigorous film industry that produced a variety of well-known films, actors, and directors.

Canada’s film industry is in full expansion as a site for Hollywood productions. The series The X-Files was famously shot in Vancouver, as was Stargate, the 2003 version of Battlestar Galactica, and The Outer Limits. The American series Queer as Folk was filmed in Toronto. After the 1980s Canada—and Vancouver in particular—became known as Hollywood North.

Canadian literature shows a mixture of French and Anglo-Saxon trends. After the mid-20th century there were many advances in literature, mainly since the 1980s. But before those years Canada’s literature also had some important authors. Whether written in English or French, Canadian literature reflects three main parts of the Canadian experience: nature and the relation with the sea, frontier life, and Canada’s position in the world.

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a trilateral trade pact among the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Implemented on January 1, 1994, the agreement is intended to foster open and unrestricted commercial relations among its three signatories.

Supplemental agreements, also part of NAFTA, are the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), and the Understanding on Emergency Action (Safeguards). Administered in the United States by the International Trade Administration of the Department of Commerce, NAFTA is one of several regional trading blocs in the Western Hemisphere.

These include the Andean Community of Nations (CAN, among Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru, f. 1969); the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM, f. 1973), the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR, among Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Paraguay, f. 1991), and the Central America–Dominican Republic–United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR, f. 2004).


NAFTA’s supporters conceive of the agreement as an important stepping stone in the creation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which would include the 34 nation-states and territories of the Western Hemisphere.

In its goal of fostering unrestricted commercial relations, NAFTA follows the principles of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO).

NAFTA has sparked a huge debate between its supporters and opponents. Its principal supporters in the private sector consist of the hemisphere’s largest corporations, most of which are based in the United States.

They argue that in all three countries NAFTA will increase living standards, create new jobs, protect the environment; and ensure compliance with labor laws. Its principal opponents include labor, environmental, faith-based, indigenous rights, and consumer rights groups.

They maintain that NAFTA, like the WTO, promotes a "race to the bottom" by favoring large corporations over smaller enterprises, benefiting the rich more than the poor; increasing inequality, causing a net loss of jobs, fostering environmental degradation, and failing to adequately protect the rights of workers.

The communiqués of sub-commander Marcos, spokesperson of the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico—a group whose rebellion against the Mexican government was timed to coincide with NAFTA’s implementation—convey many of the principal arguments of NAFTA’s opponents.

A large scholarly literature mirrors this debate. On the whole, the evidence demonstrates that NAFTA has increased trade dramatically while failing to meet its supporters’ expectations with regard to employment, poverty, inequality, the environment, and labor rights. In Mexico, poverty, inequality, and unemployment have all increased substantially since NAFTA’s implementation.

In the United States and Canada, the creation of new jobs has not kept pace with the outflows of capital and jobs traceable to NAFTA. The leftward tilt in Latin American politics since the 1990s has buttressed that continent’s opposition to multilateral trade agreements like NAFTA, the WTO, and the proposed FTAA.

Canada Nunavut Territory

As early as 1963, some natives of Canada’s Northwest Territories began agitating for greater autonomy within a nation where the vast majority live within 200 miles of the U.S. border. In particular the eastern Inuit (formerly called Eskimos) sought to control more aspects of their Arctic lives above the tree line.

Not until 1999 was Nunavut ("our land" in the Inuktitut language) separated from other northern territories by an act of Parliament. On April 1, 1999, the Territory of Nunavut was born with Iqaluit, a city of 6,000, as its capital.

Canada’s creation of Nunavut was a dramatic example of the growing awareness of indigenous rights in several nations. As in the United States, where Native Americans began rallying for recognition and respect, creating the American Indian Movement, aboriginal groups in Australia and Canada’s 630 officially recognized "First Nations" likewise began demanding greater self-determination. In 1973 after a long period of refusing to abide by most treaty rights, Canada changed course and signed six major treaties, including Nunavut’s.

Straddling the Arctic Circle, and including Ellesmere and Baffin islands and Cape Dorset—a center of Inuit indigenous art—Nunavut has a population of 29,500, 80 percent of it Inuit, in 26 settlements spread across 770,000 square miles, a fifth of Canada’s total land mass.


Most of this vast territory is inaccessible by road or rail; everything arrives, expensively, by air. The government of Nunavut, whose first premier was lawyer Paul Okalik, oversees an annual budget of about $500 million (U.S.), more than $18,000 per resident. About 84 percent comes from the federal government in Ottawa.

Prior to the 1950s most Inuit were still leading traditional lives based on hunting and fishing. The cold war changed that. In an agreement with Canada, the United States built the Distant Early Warning, or DEW, Line, a system of radar installations designed to detect Soviet invasion across the North Pole.

Although the DEW Line was useless against nuclear submarines or intercontinental ballistic missiles, it remained in place for 30 years. In 1985 Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney and U.S. president Ronald Reagan signed a new defense agreement. Abandoned DEW Line installations littered the Arctic landscape, in some cases leaching PCBs and industrial solvents into the ground.

Around the same time as the DEW Line’s installation, Canada’s government began to move Inuit families into permanent settlements where they were offered health care, education, and other services, but at a price. Their new lifestyle pushed many Inuit communities from subsistence hunting to fur trapping for the cash needed to buy newly available "southern" goods.

Reliable sources of income remain scarce in Nunavut, although mining, fisheries, tourism, and cultural products are being aggressively explored. The Internet plays a significant role, allowing Nunavut’s widely separated citizens to communicate with each other and the world via expensive satellite hookups that leaders hope to replace with fiber-optic installations.

The emergence of global warming patterns in the Arctic poses both threats and opportunities. Some believe that the storied Northwest Passage, now frozen most of the year, will soon be navigable in summer, cutting almost 5,000 miles from a sea voyage between Europe and Asia.

Nunavut’s government has discussed building a deepwater port and a 185-mile all-season road. On the other hand, climate change would likely further endanger Inuit ecology and traditions of self-sufficiency.

Quebec Sovereignty Movement

Canadian history has been plagued by issues of national identity since 1763, when Britain conquered New France in the French and Indian War. Britain’s Québec Act of 1774 recognized the rights of French-speaking Roman Catholics.

The British North America Act of 1867, the basis for Canada’s constitution, is premised on a doctrine of "two founding nations" in which the English-speaking and French-speaking cultures are recognized as equal partners.

Because the two national identities exist in a country that has traditionally favored Anglophones, Quebec (Québec), the heart of Francophone Canada, and its leaders have tried to assert their nationalism as a distinct cultural community within Canada.

The modern sovereignty movement is a product of the 1960s. It is a demand for political independence for Quebec combined with economic association with the rest of Canada. It was introduced by René Lévesque, a former Liberal cabinet minister and popular broadcast journalist who organized the Parti Québécois (PQ) in 1968. PQ gained support when the 1969 Official Languages Act seemed to trivialize Quebec’s demand for special status.

In the October Crisis of 1970, a radical fringe group called the Front de Libération du Québec kidnapped James Cross, the British trade commissioner in Montreal, and Pierre Laporte, Quebec’s minister of labor and immigration. Quebec soon asked the Canadian armed forces to intervene, and the next day the federal government banned the FLQ under the War Measures Act.

Laporte’s body was found October 17, and a group holding Cross released him in return for safe passage to Cuba in early December. A federal inquiry later ruled that the suspension of normal civil liberties had been illegal.

In 1976, the PQ gained control of Quebec’s government and promised to consult the people of Quebec before taking any steps toward independence and secession. Four years later, majority-French provincial voters soundly rejected a referendum to authorize sovereignty negotiations with Ottawa.

Even so, the PQ was reelected in 1981, and in 1982 it refused to accept the new Canadian constitution. When the PQ removed sovereignty-association from its party platform in 1985, the Liberal Party regained control of the Quebec assembly.

Reorganized under the leadership of former finance minister Jacques Parizeau, the PQ again promised to declare Quebec independent after the voters of Quebec voted oui in a referendum.

The Meech Lake Accord, which agreed to conditions that Quebec had placed on its acceptance of the national constitution, collapsed in 1990 due to opposition. A subsequent package of constitutional reforms, presented to voters in a 1992 national referendum, was also defeated.

By 1994 the Bloc Québécois, a national party devoted to Quebec sovereignty, had won enough votes to become the official opposition party in Ottawa. Another sovereignty referendum in 1995 lost narrowly.

Canada was startled in November 2006 when Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper proposed a resolution, passed overwhelmingly by Parliament, stating that the 7 million "Québécois form a nation within a united Canada". Although this recognition was called "symbolic", it was unclear whether it might spark a renewed push for Quebec’s independence.

Pierre Trudeau

Pierre Trudeau

Pierre Trudeau served as prime minister of Canada from 1968 to 1979 and 1980 to 1984. Born to an affluent Montreal family on October 18, 1919, he was educated at Jean-de-Brébeuf, an elite Jesuit preparatory school, received a law degree from the University of Montreal, and studied at Harvard University, the École des Sciences Politiques in Paris, and the London School of Economics. During a brief teaching career, he acted as the assistant professor of law at the University of Montreal from 1961 to 1965.

His 1965 election to the Canadian House of Commons marked the beginning of his ascendancy in Canadian politics. Lester B. Pearson appointed him parliamentary secretary in 1966 and then minister of justice and attorney general. Trudeau won the passage of social welfare reform measures regarding gun control, abortion, and homosexuality.

As the leader of the Liberal Party, he became the prime minister in 1968, largely due to his opposition to the Quebec separatist group Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ). In 1972 his Liberal Party was weakened, possessing a minority of seats in the House of Commons, and relied on the support of the New Democratic Party (NDP) to pass its agenda.


Trudeau struggled against economic and domestic problems throughout the 1970s. In 1979 Trudeau lost his position as prime minister to the Progressive Conservative Party; he regained power in the election of 1980, beginning his fourth term on March 3 of that year. His administration witnessed the defeat of a referendum in May 1980 on the separation of Quebec.

Trudeau’s legacy as prime minister includes his successfully patriating the Canadian Constitution from the British Parliament, an act that gave Canada the power to amend the document without the need to seek the approval of the British Crown.

He had included a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guaranteed certain civil liberties, in the constitution that year. Sensitive to the linguistic preferences of Francophone Canadians, he passed laws that made Canada an officially bilingual nation and used his office to support multiculturalism.

Trudeau at the Liberal convention after winning the leadership

Canadian journalists named Trudeau the top Canadian newsmaker of the 20th century in 1999. In 1971, at age 51, he married 22-year-old Vancouver socialite Margaret Sinclair. Their union, which produced three children and was the subject of enormous press coverage, ended in divorce in 1984.

Trudeau’s works include Federalism and the French Canadians, Approaches to Politics, and Conversations with Canadians. Pierre Trudeau, the 15th Canadian prime minister, died on September 28, 2000.