Meandering thoughts on trade

What is trade all about? Why do we buy food from other countries when we could probably grow and process it ourselves?

I believe the reason is there are some things we do well and there are things other provinces, other countries do well, so we offer them the product of our expertise and buy from them their products.

Sometimes, though, it is strictly that they can grow it and make it cheaper than we can, so we sell them things like nuclear reactors and sophisticated research and buy canned fruit and in expensive cars, even meat that competes with Canadian grown products.

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada recently sent out a news release which says that Germany is our eighth largest export market and is a key science and trade partner for Canada.

Canadian scientists work with their German counterparts on things like crop genetics, diseases, agro-system resilience, horticulture, micro-organism collections and pork production.

When you hear this, you might wonder why we have invested so much in the U.S. market and why their president feels Canada has hurt the U.S. financially?

It seems ludicrous, given the comparative sizes of our economies and the fact that anything that hurts the U.S. hurts the Canadian economy as much or more.

There are other people out there who are smarter than me who are working on the problem of trade diversification, visiting Japan, China, Korea and other countries to persuade them to buy more Canadian products, and likely promising Canada will reciprocate to create a trade balance.

We can’t ignore the U.S. market, and as Pierre Trudeau once said, living next to the U.S. is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No mattered how friendly and even tempered, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.

Our economies are intertwined, and not just on a nation-to-nation basis. Every province has a relationship with the individual states to the south, not always friendly, but still a necessary part of the provincial economies.

However, as the U.S. is a very competitive country, there will always be some friction and one way of mitigating that is to have more trade with other countries such as China, Japan, Mexico, Korea, India and all the other countries.

We still buy wine (to name only one product) from South Africa, Spain, France and many, many other countries, which all makes sense — as long as it’s not from a country that’s trying to kill us.

What doesn’t make sense is making a trade deal with a government that has a really bad human rights record and produces terrorists who will try to kill Canadians and anybody else they don’t like.

If we need to stay “friends” with them to have some diplomatic influence there, maybe we should find another way to do it.