Harrison’s NAFTA contributions will hopefully be more than noise

Trade and Export Development Minister Jeremy Harrison’s career has been — and continues to be — plagued by the suspicions that his foremost focus is always politics.

For that reason, one can’t help be at least a little suspicious — and maybe a little concerned — about Harrison’s recent pronouncement that Saskatchewan needed to be more involved in North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) talks.

At a time when Saskatchewan’s — and Canada’s — trade livelihood is facing the hostilities of the ultimate political gameplayer in U.S. President Donald Trump, some would argue the last thing we need is the interjection of another provincial politician eager to weigh down Canada’s negotiating position with more domestic infighting.

But we are just going to have to trust that Harrison — and other political partisans, including the federal Conservative Opposition and the premiers who were briefed Friday by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — get the bigger picture. And notwithstanding his love for political game-playing, there is reason to believe Harrison does.

Since arriving on the provincial scene after a career in federal politics where he briefly (from 2004-06) served as the Conservative MP for Desnethe-missinippi-churchill River, Harrison has only enhanced his reputation as hard-line partisan. That was evident in his “no wrongdoing ” defence of Bill Boyd’s involvement in the Global Transportation Hub (GTH) and his eagerness to pivot to the federal government’s carbon tax on just about any question asked of him in the legislature.

Factor in Harrison’s close ties to federal Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer and the eagerness of Scheer and virtually every other Conservative to use NAFTA negotiations as an opportunity to score pre-2019-election political points, and there’s more reason to be suspicious of the Saskatchewan trade and export minister’s intentions.

But let’s do a deeper dive into the nature of politics and politicians like Harrison.

For starters, political games are always going to be played. If we are going to be suspicious that Conservatives are now playing political games to the detriment of the country’s trade negotiation position, shouldn’t we be equally suspicious that Trudeau and the Liberals — as the Conservatives claim — are playing their own games during these negotiations so that they can, essentially, run against Trump in 2019?

Let us also put into perspective that such internal political back and forth humming in the background of the NAFTA talks is often little more than white noise that turns out to be meaningless in the end.

Also, we need to acknowledge that the hardcore positions politicians like Harrison take are often based on their sincere belief issues like trade are more critical. And, occasionally, these priorities do happen to align with the immediate needs of a jurisdiction. Saskatchewan and Canada do need a strong position on trade and export in dealings with Trump. That’s something conservatives have always provided. For example, one might have had little time for the nasty, partisanship style of former federal Conservative agriculture minister Gerry Ritz. But his determination to dismantle the Canadian Wheat Board was aligned with the needs and reality of modern western Canadian agriculture. One shudders to think what NAFTA negotiations would be like today if the old CWB was also in Trump’s crosshairs. Finally, for however partisan Harrison is, he is also a minister who knows his files and their importance to Saskatchewan. This is why one of Premier Scott Moe’s first orders of business was to re-jig the old economy portfolio to one more emphasizing the importance of trade.

“We need to get a deal. This is incredibly important for our economy, which is probably the most export-dependent in the entire country, and we’ve been concerned about a pattern we’ve been seeing — moving backward on market access, moving backward on trade access, not moving forward,” he told the Leaderpost’s David Fraser.

It’s a valid view that goes beyond the political noise now surrounding NAFTA. Let’s hope Harrison and others keep their focus on real needs and not just the politics.