Educational Media Reviews Online

The Emperor’s New Clothes presents an edgy and argumentative angle on the negative impact of capital mobility and free trade in North America. While this unapologetic documentary is contrary to the well publicized corporate and government positions on North American free trade: it does present a point of view that the mainstream media sometimes treats as inconsequential. Director Magnus Isacsson and Producer Iolande Cadrin-Rossignol represent corporate globalization as a conspiracy that seeks the maximization of profits through the fictitious promises of free trade; while at the same time masking the demoralizing impact of unemployment, worker exploitation and environmental damage. The producers clear intent (and predisposed partiality) is to have their work serve as a means to uncloak the “lies” of free trade by exposing the real expense and ugly effects it places on society and regional economies.

Cadrin-Rossignol and Isacsson forthrightly focus on the early days of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the impact on Canadian, Mexican, and American workers at that time. The producers tell the story in a first person narrative along with interviews of laid-off Canadian Pacific paper mill workers, autoworkers, academics and writers. The film starts with the closing and relocating of a Canadian Pacific paper mill to Mexico, and makes further mention of past closings of steel mills in Pittsburgh. Laid-off workers tell their troubling stories with several interjections of commentary by Linda McQuaig, Canadian journalist and writer, who describes how the governments of North America have ceded their responsibility for political and economic policy making to multi-national corporations. The personal accounts of workers, coverage of demonstrations, and commentary are set in an orchestration that helps reinforce McQuaig’s position and the producers’ anti-NAFTA theme.

The producers very effectively demonstrate and support their argument by organizing a trip to Mexico with a team of unemployed Canadian autoworkers to view the new facilities that their former employers have opened in Mexico. What they witness on their trip is state of the art plants located on landscaped properties that rival premium golf courses. This view was in sharp contrast to what the participants experience when visiting and talking to the impoverished and politically disenfranchised Mexican employees. The producers clarify the extent of their poverty and exploitation by showing examples of substandard housing, that comes complete without running water; elaborating on the very low wages for Mexican workers; and discussing the abusive and unsafe working conditions at American operated plants in Mexico. These scenes of poverty are set in contrast against the very comfortable settings of corporate lunches and political signing ceremonies that tout the economic benefits of free trade.

The program’s message is very clear: corporate greed at any cost is the driving force behind free trade. The production is biased and unbalanced in the presentation and analyses of free trade, capital mobility and global markets. However, this documentary does have value as a resource that identifies and defines the negative effects of corporate power in the ongoing globalization of manufacturing, services, markets and labor. The producers have offered a very well organized and provocative perspective on the negative outcomes of this global corporate power on middle income workers and economically depressed classes of people in North America. The Emperor’s New Clothes is recommended for course work dealing with free trade and corporate globalization, and as a means to spark discussion on the topic.