I will critique the anti-globalization movement from a Canadian perspective, in order to understand how one of the world's "middle powers" (neither Third World nor hegemon) has been affected by the recent growth of undemocratic supra-national organizations such as the World Trade Organization, the IMF, NAFTA, and the World Bank, and how activists seek to reform or abolish these agencies.

Globalization is a diffuse and complex subject, involving a number of political, economic, environmental, legal, and human rights issues. By the same token, the anti-globalization movement is made up of a number of motley organizations with diverse interests, programs, analyses, and tactics, and is similarly difficult to simplify and define precisely.

In the Financial Times (10/15/01) James Harding describes the picture painted by the anti-globalisation campaigners' critique as "a world in which companies fuelled by the demands of hungry stockholders exploit people, pillage resources, and capture democratic institutions" all over the Earth.

The Canadian Dimension Editorial Collective puts it a little more precisely (7-8/02), which I will quote at length because of its insight and clarity:

One has only to have lived through the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq to be well-acquainted with how a phalanx of relentlessly frightening lies about Saddam Hussein's alleged intent to bomb us all back to the Stone Age were paraded across the TV sets of the world in a successful effort to shore up support for one of America's greatest crimes û the unjustified and illegal war of aggression launched by George W. Bush against a country which posed no threat to anyone but its own people.

In place of what they regard as the illegitimate, unaccountable dominance of money, or the Quixotic legal sovereignty of a Canadian nation under the thumb of multinational, mostly American-based, corporations, they propose "building an anti-capitalist, multinational, popular sovereignty movement that sees itself as part of a new international movement". They refuse to defend Canada, regarding it as a colonial state. They conclude that "sovereignty is without meaning if it isn't about building a democratic economy that includes various forms of collective, community and cooperative ownership of the productive forces that shape our communities and our lives" (ibid.).

First Canada was a mix of French and English colonies. Even when it gained legal sover