Free-trade election win well worth celebrating
Twenty-five years ago tonight, the free trade election of 1988 was won by Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government. It was what some commentators have described as the most negative election in Canadian history, which isn’t altogether too surprising, since it was also one of the most important.
Mulroney is now able to chuckle at the absurd attacks levelled against him personally and toward free trade in general, but at the time, the rhetoric was tough to take.
“(Former Liberal Prime Minister) John Turner questioned my patriotism and loyalty to Canada and said I wanted to become governor of the 51st state,” recalled Mulroney, who was reached at his Montreal office earlier this week.
“Our critics at the time said free trade would mean the end of your medicare, your old age pension, the auto industry, the end of our culture, the end of regional development and the end of equalization. They said our water would be stolen and they said it was the end of Canada,” said Mulroney.
Now that a quarter of a century has passed, it is virtually impossible to find a credible critic of free trade.
In a speech delivered to the Montreal Board of Trade by Prime Minister Stephen Harper last Friday, he said the kind of criticisms levelled towards free trade 25 years ago should cause those who made the claims to blush.
“These forecasts, of course, turned out to be wrong, not just somewhat off the mark, but com- pletely wrong, even embarrassing to this day,” said Harper.
Mulroney had a good laugh recalling then Liberal MP Sheila Copps saying that the incidence of AIDS would increase in Canada because the U.S. would take over our hospitals and bring in contaminated U.S. blood.
“I remember Roy MacLaren, the Liberals’ International Trade critic, said at the time: ‘We will blame every sparrow that falls on free trade,’” reflected Mulroney.
Ironically, just this week, MacLaren co-authored a column in another newspaper singing the praises of the Harper government’s recent free trade agreement with Europe. There’s nothing like success to change vicious critics into vociferous supporters.
“The only thing that we’ve lost,” added Mulroney, “is some of our insecurities vis-à-vis competing with America and the rest of the world. Canadians were told repeatedly that we can’t compete with a country 10 times our size. The CBC, the Toronto Star, academics, you name it, they all said that Canada would be crushed. They have all been proven wrong.” In spades.
Industries that were supposedly doomed, like the vintners in Niagara and the Okanagan, are flourishing. Rather than disappear, Peerless Clothing Inc. in Montreal, for instance, has become the largest manufacturer of men’s suits in the world.
Trade volumes have more than tripled in less than 20 years, from $235 billion in 1989 to almost $750 billion in 2008. Millions of new jobs were created on both sides of the border.
But the deal very nearly didn’t happen. Tonight in Calgary, the top two negotiators of the deal — former U.S. Treasury Secretary James Baker and Mulroney’s former chief of staff, Derek Burney, who later went on to be Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. — will reminisce about how the free trade deal, which was the precursor to NAFTA, came down to the wire as the congressional fast-track deadline approached at midnight on Oct. 3, 1987.
One of the non-negotiables for Mulroney was a binding, dispute settlement resolution. At about 9:30 at night on Oct. 3, Baker called Mulroney to tell him that while they were close to an agreement, he doubted he could get the dispute settlement mechanism because congressional leaders argued it would weaken their constitutional sovereignty.
“I said: ‘Well, Jim, I’m going to call President Reagan and ask him how it is that the U.S. can negotiate a major nuclear reduction treaty with its worst enemy, the Soviet Union, but it can’t negotiate a free-trade agreement with its best friend, Canada.’”
Baker asked Mulroney to give him 20 minutes. And sure enough, about 20 minutes later, at about 10 p.m., Baker burst into the room in Washington and threw down a handwritten note on the table and said: “‘All right, you can have your goddamned dispute settlement mechanism. Now can we send the report to Congress?’
“It was a nail-biter right down to the end,” said Mulroney. “I look back on it now and I think, holy smokes, thank goodness it all turned out. Look at the results.”
Indeed. As Harper said in his recent speech, “That trade agreement with the United States was not only first, it was revolutionary in a way that only a trade agreement between ourselves and our colossus of a neighbour really could be.”