More than ever before, major international talks are under the public microscope. And Canadians are making themselves heard. There are a lot of strong and differing opinions, even in places where you'd expect a party line. Here on the West Coast, for example, we are fighting for free trade in lumber - under your protectionist view of the world, thousands of BC families would go hungry. A badly thought-out position could ruin all that we have in a blink of an eye.
Official sites tend to be pretty dry and full of platitudes.
AmericasCanada.org , operated by the Hemisphere Summit Office. You might want to scan through some of the policy sites. An ambivalent paper there by Royal Bank economist John McCallum shows how hard it is for even its boosters to say exactly what free trade has done for us - or to us. It offers a well-expressed, fundamentalist viewpoint. To get a grounded view about everyday impacts of free trade, I e-mailed journalist, author, Web surfer and Calgary housewife Penney Kome .