No to NAFTA gender chapter
Largely to their credit, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have embraced every opportunity to push for the advancement of women. They i ntroduced gender quotas for cabinet appointments. They centred their first meeting with the Trump administration on a council to promote women in business. And they’ve tied much of Canada’s foreign aid to programs that help women and girls.
Even so, it came as a surprise to hear Foreign Mini s t er Chrystia Freeland announce last week that Canada would push for a renegotiated NAFTA to include a “new chapter on gender rights, in keeping with our c ommitment to gender equality.” Trade talks don’t seem like an opportunity to discuss gender. Whatever do the Liberals have in mind?
If pressed on this, it’s not clear the Liberals could provide a coherent answer. Which is not to suggest they’d say nothing. Quite possibly, they’d point to the recently negotiated gender appendix of the Canada- Chile Free Trade Agreement, which acknowledges the importance of “incorporating a gender perspective into the promotion of inclusive economic growth,” and “promoting equal rights, treatment and opportunity between men and women and the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women.”
But it would still be unclear what this fine sounding language means. After all, trade agreements are completely agnostic on the gender of the labourers and investors they affect. Their purpose is to increase the flow of goods and services between countries, by committing signatories to bringing down trade barriers. How could a text that’s silent on gender nonetheless be used to ensure equal opportunity, rights and treatment for women and men?
A glance at the emerging body of literature on gender theory and trade provides some idea of what feminist policymakers have in mind. Reports such as the European Parliament’s 2016 study on Gender Equality in Trade Agreements urge policymakers to pay attention to the ways in which trade agreements hurt women, particularly by threatening jobs that predominantly employ their sex.
This raises an interesting point, although it’s not clear these theorists would welcome the conclusions to which this kind of gender analysis leads. Trade agreements do tend to lead to job losses in particular sectors, and many sectors do disproportionately employ one sex ( for reasons that, as former Google engineer James Damore will tell you, one has to be quite foolhardy to speculate on). But it seems unlikely that an agreement like NAFTA would hurt the so- called “pink” sectors — such as nursing, teaching, or child, elder or personal care — that predominantly employ women. These sectors are service- oriented. Their work doesn’t lend itself to being outsourced to Mexico. Nurses, teachers and manicurists must literally be within reach of their customers.
By comparison, trade liberalization can significantly affect advanced economies’ goods- producing sectors, as companies can fairly easily relocate to lower- cost juris- dictions without compromising their business models. As the U. S. Congressional Research Service has noted, NAFTA’s implementation coincided with a 30 per cent drop in manufacturing employment in the U. S., resulting in more than five million manufacturing job losses between 1993 and 2016. Incidentally, that’s five million jobs that would have been predominantly filled by men.
Donald Trump seized on this issue and raised it frequently during the 2016 campaign. He pledged to rip up or renegotiate trade agreements, and to bring back jobs to America’s industrial heartland. He wants NAFTA 2.0 to include protectionist provisions, like “Buy American” requirements, that would at least temporarily halt job losses that hurt this base of white, lesser educated men.
Most Canadians have recoiled from Trump’s rhetoric, recognizing it for what it is: regressive, protectionist and nationalist. Would they feel the same way if the Liberals protected sectors that predominantly employed women? Conversely, would the Liberals’ commitment to gender equality lead them to fight for “Buy Canadian” requirements if male workers were hurting as much as the Americans? And if the government was in fact committed to protecting opportunities for men and women in equal measure, what room would that leave to do the very thing they’re at the trade talks for: to break down trade barriers, rather than to mount more of them?
These thorny questions are all hypotheticals. In all likelihood, the Liberals don’t have any intention of addressing them at the negotiating table. Rather, they’ll presumably bargain for symbolic but meaningless gender provisions, which would be fine as far as it goes, provided they don’t make any hard concessions in exchange for them.
But as these questions illustrate, a government actually committed to ensuring gender equality in trade — and various other areas — can quickly back itself into a difficult corner. It may have the well- intentioned aim of addressing vulnerability, but gender (or other identity characteristics) tends to be only a rough proxy for vulnerability, not an actual determinant of it. And in cases where the group that’s actually vulnerable is a historically privileged one, policymakers often have no inclination to extend them the same helping hand. As the U. S. Democrats are l earning, such double- standards can easily foster a politics of exclusion and resentment.
Of course, none of this means t he government shouldn’t concern itself with vulnerability, or, in the case of trade, ensure all Canadians enjoy its benefits. But it does suggest policies should be targeted towards those who demonstrate the need for it, not based on who fits into this or that identity box. In the case of trade, this might mean matching international trade agreements with domestic policies that ensure displaced workers of either sex are trained to succeed in a new economy. It might also mean introducing redistributive policies to ensure all Canadians reap the gains of a trade-liberalized world.
Fortunately, Freeland did also acknowledge the importance of these objectives in her speech. She simply need not have brought gender into any part of it.