One of the highlights of my week in Seattle, apart from getting my first taste of tear gas, and then only at a distance, was doing a press conference with Tom Hayden, a California state senator, who, as a member of the infamous Chicago Seven, organized the protests against the Vietnam War at the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

Like me, he was inclined to worry for a number of years that Generation X was too resigned to the new world order being drawn up in the board rooms of the corporations and obediently enacted by captive governments at international forums. But, in an article after the Battle in Seattle, Hayden himself observed that “the Seattle protestors represent the break through of the vast hip-hop generation into a public effort to challenge the system.”

Hayden went on to say: “Seattle will have greater consequences. In Chicago, we were dealing with a single issue: the Vietnam War. The Seattle activists were confronting the very nature of the way economics, environmentalism and human rights are going to be shaped for the rest of our lives. The so- called New World order has to do with everything: exports, prevailing wages, sweatshops, sea turtles, the price and quality of food. The Vietnam War was going to end eventually, but the new world order will not. You’ll either be part of it or you’ll be frozen out.”

At that same press conference, we were joined by other American local, state and national legislators who share a critical perspective on the WTO. These American legislators released a joint, open letter to US President Clinton. Echoing the democratic concerns of Canadian critics of the WTO, they wrote: “We wish to communicate to you in the strongest way possible our view that the WTO, its operation, and activities are inconsistent in many ways with the values we consider to be fundamental to our democratic republic.”

Bill Blaikie, MP