CETA critics have distorted vision of country
SIMILAR OBJECTIONS WERE LEVELLED AT NAFTA, WHICH TURNED OUT TO BE A BOON FOR CANADA
Elizabeth May, leader of the federal Green party, and Jerry Dias, head of the country’s largest private-sector union, were positively giddy last week when it seemed the Belgian region of Wallonia had torpedoed prospects for free trade between Canada and Europe.
“CETA collapse is good news for drug prices, sovereignty,” May tweeted last Friday.
Proclaimed Dias: “Thank you to the ppl (sic) of #Wallonia for standing up and speaking up about #CETA to say enough is enough. It’s time for fair trade!”
Here’s what this unfair, sovereignty-killing abomination, now back on track following six days of haggling in and near Brussels (because everything in Belgium is near Brussels, let’s face it), will do for Canada if implemented, according to estimates in the joint-Canada-EU study that inaugurated the talks in 2009:
It will boost Canadians’ collective income by $12 billion a year. It will increase trade between Canada and the 28-nation bloc by 20 per cent. It will add 80,000 or so jobs. And it will boost average Canadian household annual income by $1,000.
Granted, these are projections only, and these are often the stuff of wishful thinking and political marketing, yes? So let’s stick to what we know. CETA, if ratified more or less as it now stands, would remove nearly all — 98 per cent — of 9,000 existing EU tariffs on Canadian imports.
Now let’s extrapolate from the results of North American free trade, about which arguments similar to those now being levelled at CETA were made back in 1988, when the original Canada-U.S. deal was still an apple in Brian Mulroney’s eye.
That deal, which went into effect Jan. 1, 1989, and grew in 1994 to include Mexico, was purported to be the death of Canada as we knew it. John Turner, the Liberal leader in 1988, had staked his future on this, calling it “the fight of my life.” But Turner and New Democrat leader Ed Broadbent, also adamantly opposed to liberalized trade, were wrong.
From 1990 to 1995 Canadian exports to the United States grew more than 10 per cent annually — about twice the rate of growth for our exports worldwide. The deal was a particular boon for Canadian manufacturers of technology — telecom gear, office equipment, machinery of various kinds.
North America-wide, the benefits of NAFTA continued to accrue for all three partners. In 1993, according to Canadian government data, trilateral trade amounted to US$288 billion. By last year it had more than tripled, to $1 trillion. In 2015 the three NAFTA partners represented nearly a third of the world’s gross domestic product, 28 per cent, with only seven per cent of the population.
In the two decades-plus of NAFTA, Canadian merchandise exports to the U.S. have grown at an annualized rate of about 4.5 per cent. Canada’s total merchandise trade with the U.S. has more than doubled, while trade with Mexico has octupled. That would be an eight-fold increase, kids.
Here’s the kicker: NAFTA at its inception comprised a trading zone of 370 million people. Europe, by its lonesome, is 500 million people (including the United Kingdom). Its annual imports alone, about $2.3 trillion, are worth marginally more than Canada’s entire GDP, about $2 trillion.
Short of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, currently mired in United States electionyear protectionism, CETA is the most ambitious trade agreement that has ever been conceived. Combined with a still-possible TPP, and combined with a resurrected energy industry courtesy of new pipeline capacity, it can be a game-changer. It is also the likeliest means for Canada to lessen its strategic dependence on access to the U.S. market, which accounts for 75 per cent of this country’s exports.
To all this — including the pipeline, naturally — May says no, never, nyet. Her preference apparently is that Canadians return to an all-local agrarian economy, such as that of the hobbits in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shire, with one gardener, one innkeeper and a wizard. If the Brexit referendum was Little England on the march, then May’s vision is of Canada as the Shire. How curious that the left, including a conflicted New Democratic Party, now finds itself in the same ideological camp as Trumpists and Brexiters.
Should CETA go forward, as seems likely, the Conservative party in the Harper years will deserve much of the credit. It did the heavy lifting, beginning a half-dozen years ago.
Tory MPs in the House of Commons this past week can’t say the same, however. It should be painfully obvious now that International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland’s ending talks in Belgium last Friday, with a bit of drama, catalyzed the last-ditch horsetrading among the Europeans that has put a deal back in view.
Freeland is completing the previous government’s work, in effect, with an approach that has been straightforward and, apparently, effective. Some grace, rather than partisan hooting from Tory trade critic Gerry Ritz, would have put the official Opposition in a position to share a few accolades, when those land. But old habits die hard.