SEEKING TO REFORM GUN, DRUG POLICIES PM'S BEST OPTION

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a decade late and at the wrong
meeting if his intention is to focus on free trade during this
weekend's Summit of the Americas.

Trade liberation across the hemisphere certainly would be among the
best methods to promote prosperity and social development. But since
that ill-fated meeting in Quebec seven years ago, hopes for a free
trade agreement that extends from the Beaufort Sea to Strait of
Magellan have long been dashed.

But the news hasn't been all bad. Over the last decade, Latin America
has undergone another of its periodic massive revolutions. Only this
time, rather than with guns in the mountains, this battle was fought
with votes in the ballot box.

From El Salvador and Nicaragua in Central America through to
Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Ecuador in South America,
the perpetually poor and downtrodden uncharacteristically have braved
the consequences and chosen leftist (sometimes stridently so)
leaders, while the perpetually oligarchic rich uncharacteristically
have allowed the elections to proceed and the change in governments
to take place.

That these governments often are protectionist and erratic is
something that should legitimately concern Prime Minister Harper. But
that these governments exist at all is no doubt a much more positive
sign of things to come on this side of the world than anything even a
trans-hemispheric free trade agreement could have achieved.

Canada has legitimate concerns about the future of free trade in this
part of world, but getting into debates with the likes of Hugo Chavez
won't help the auto, lumber or energy sectors north of the 49th
parallel. Mr. Harper is far better off to confine this debate to
private sessions with U.S. President Barack Obama than to promote an
ideological stance on which he is increasingly in the minority.

Bob Page, chair of the National Round Table on the Environment and
the Economy, on Thursday released a report that spells out just how
serious the threat really is to the trading relationship between the
two most northern economies in the Americas. U.S. lawmakers are
determined neither Canada nor trade laws will be considered as their
country uses environmental rules to further a protectionist agenda.

Canada will also find few allies in Latin America, which has become
increasingly dependent on Brazil's economic clout and Venezuela's
petrodollars to address its own problems. But that doesn't mean there
aren't important things to discuss at the summit now underway in
Trinidad and Tobago. Chief among them is a file in which Canada has
an abundance of allies south of the Rio Grande.

The 19th century drug laws of the United States and its failed war on
drugs has made the richest country in the Americas equivalent to
having a Hells Angels clubhouse in the neighbourhood. From the
mountains of Peru and Bolivia, through the jungles of Colombia, the
beach resorts of the Caribbean and the deserts of Mexico, drug
cartels have destabilized governments, cost public treasuries
billions of dollars, wreaked havoc and violence and taken tens of
thousands of lives.

Over the last two years in Mexico alone, the drug wars have resulted
in more than 10,000 bloody murders that have escalated in brutality.
And that violence hasn't been restricted to Latin nations. The
streets of British Columbia's lower mainland are increasingly taking
on the violent complexion one used to associate with the likes of
Medellin or Cali in Colombia. Quebec police have rounded up dozens of
bikers and, even in Saskatoon, parks are littered with drug needles
and the streets with the human result of a failed drug war strategy.

The United States not only is the market that fuels the massive and
deadly drug industry but it's the source of the weapons that have
become its hallmark. Hours before President Barack Obama met with his
Mexican counterpart, Felipe Calderon, an ambush on a convoy of
soldiers in Mexico's Guerrero state resulted in 16 deaths.

Mexican and American authorities who have traced the source of the
high-powered and automatic weapons used in such attacks have
documented that 90 per cent of them have been bought legally in the
U.S., mostly from Texas and Arizona. Yet the U.S. persists not only
with its failed drug strategy, but in promoting the world's most
liberal gun laws -- laws that sow violence across the hemisphere and
have been directly responsible for the deaths of more than 120,000
Americans since the war on terror was officially launched Sept. 11, 2001.

In trying to dissuade its closest ally from persisting with these
polices, Canada not only will have allies across Latin America but
especially among Mr. Obama's own Democrats.