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It’ll never pass. Pitchforks and torches will descend on Pennsylvania Avenue first.

It will be imposed. It already is being imposed. The following is from a transcript from May 2005 meeting where the Independent Task Force on the Future of North America presented the results of their report on Building a North American Community.

The group that is pushing this through realizes that it could never implement a European Union type infrastructure so they propose seven "lean" institutions.

Read this. Seriously. Look at the part about getting input not only from their own governments but from the intergovernmental group. Also, follow the link and read about their thoughts on a common currency (it would be the US dollar for both Mexico and Canada). Click through and search on "Bush". See the discussion about this guy's conversation with Bush when he was Governor of Texas.

ROBERT PASTOR: Well, that may be a bit esoteric and perhaps we’ll leave that for questions. Winston Churchill once said that people create institutions and then institutions then shape people. This is an idea that’s not very popular in the United States or in North America. North American integration, which as we’ve heard, has advanced very rapidly over the last decade, indeed, if you measure integration as intraregional trade as a percentage of world trade, North America after one decade is as integrated as Europe is after five decades. Social and economic integration has proceeded very rapidly. What has not happened is governance has not followed this in a large market.

We have made the opposite mistake of Europe. Europe over-institutionalized. It created very supranational, very intrusive— too many institutions, and North America created almost no credible institutions. So it was the consensus of our group that, if we are going to translate the very specific recommendations on how to achieve a North American community into real policy, it would require institutions to put the ideas forward and institutions to make sure that they’re fully implemented. It’s the absence of institutions today that allows individual summits to stand as photo opportunities, rather than as opportunities for furthering integration.

So what we decided to do is we made several recommendations. The most important was, there is no interest in North America to replicate the European experience. We don’t want to create large supranational institutions that are as intrusive as that of Europe. On the other hand, we did feel that some lean institutions were absolutely essential.

The first critical institution is the annual summit. The North American summit that occurred in Texas on March 23rd is a very important statement. But if it’s to be more than a photo opportunity, we felt that a second institution was essential, and that would be a North American advisory council made up of eminent individuals from all three countries, appointed for terms that are longer than those of the governments, and staggered over time. This council would propose ideas for dealing with North American challenges, whether they be regulatory or transportation or infrastructure or education, and put forth options to the three leaders to consider ways to adopt a North American approach. It would be a public voice for North America and, therefore, a symbol. It would ensure that not only the agenda that went before the summit meeting would be publicly known and debated, but would be monitored and implemented. And hopefully, the three leaders would turn to this North American council and say, “Look, we’re getting wonderful advice on what our government should do. We’re not getting very good advice on what we should do about North America as a whole. Why don’t you prepare a plan for us on education, on agriculture, on the environment, and we could consider that even as we consider the advice of our government.”

The third institution would be an inter-parliamentary group on North America. So much of the agenda on North America today is domestic, which is another way of saying that our parliaments have a very important role to play, and yet our parliaments are mostly pulled backwards by their constituencies, rather than forwards to looking at how their constituencies relate across borders. And perhaps the only way to compensate for that would be to have our parliamentary leaders meet every other year in a North American context addressing an agenda very similar to the one that the North American advisory council would develop for the summit meeting.

The fourth institution is one that would replace the ad hoc dispute settlement mechanisms that were in NAFTA. I think these have functioned well, but their credibility is increasingly questioned not only by an inability to assure compliance by the governments to such problems and challenges like softwood lumber, but more importantly there— because they are ad hoc, there is always a problem of conflict of interest, and there’s a problem of a lack of precedent. We have now reached the point where we should have a permanent tribunal that deals with trade and investment issues.

A fifth institution is to deal with trade-remedy problems: countervailing duties, problems of predatory pricing, if you will, as we deal with this in large market, and to do so with the tri-national competition commission. This tri-national competition commission can deal— can be in effect a North American anti-trust agency reflecting the fact that the markets now are continental. They’re no longer simply national.

A sixth institution that was mentioned both by Pedro Aspe and Bill Weld is a North American investment fund to narrow this development gap between Mexico and its neighbors.

Seventh, to encourage an identity and to encourage research and to encourage our students to recognize that they are not only citizens of each country, but residents of North America; to sponsor Centers for North America Studies in all three countries very similar to what the European Union does in all of our countries, but which none of our countries do for ourselves.

So these are the institutions that we recommend. We believe they should be lean, they should be few, they should be un-bureaucratic, they should be responding to the more pragmatic approach that reflects the North American as contrasted with the European model, but they are essential.

There are other ideas that were developed in the report, too, that deal with, for example, an alternative to [the] Kyoto [Protocol on climate change] on a North American basis, to reduce emissions; a North American testing center, which could be used to insure that regulations are convergent with each other; and of course, a North American resource accord that would deal with some remaining problem. So the short is that we need to think beyond the recommendations to institutions that would ensure that these recommendations would be implemented and that we foster a North American approach.