Opposition
Opponents of the nascent Atlantica project see it having a neo-liberal agenda that would harm worker pay and rights, benefit corporations at the expense of consumers, and undermine social services through reduced taxation. Protesters were seen at the June 2006 conference, and large-scale demonstrations occurred in Halifax, Nova Scotia from June 14-16 in opposition to the accord. One of these protests turned into a small scale riot, when the Black Bloc, which included perhaps 150 protesters, moved off the planned route and ran towards the business district of Spring Garden Road, likely planning to attack or demonstrate outside the many outlets of large corporations there. Police cars and buildings were pelted with rocks and water balloons filled with paint, but police quickly quelled most of the violence. Three people were seriously injured. Twenty protesters were arrested and were released on bail after the conference ended.
Additional protests have been held with concerns over the proposed privately funded $1 Billion super-highway planned to cut across New Brunswick and Maine with corridors into Vermont and northern New Hampshire.
Read more about this topic: Atlantica (trade Zone)
Famous quotes containing the word opposition:
“The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition in all points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public opinion, the other, private opinion; one, fame, the other, desert; one, feats, the other, humility; one, lucre, the other, love; one, monopoly, and the other, hospitality of mind.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is useless to check the vain dunce who has caught the mania of scribbling, whether prose or poetry, canzonets or criticisms,—let such a one go on till the disease exhausts itself. Opposition like water, thrown on burning oil, but increases the evil, because a person of weak judgment will seldom listen to reason, but become obstinate under reproof.”
—Sarah Josepha Buell Hale 1788–1879, U.S. novelist, poet and women’s magazine editor. American Ladies Magazine, pp. 36-40 (December 1828)