A rchive Date
[ 22-04-2017 ]
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[ Canada ]
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[http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/lawrence-solomon-trump-just-might-make-us-put-on-our-big-boy-pants-and-make-canada-great-again
Trump just might make us put on our big-boy pants and make Canada great again
Lawrence Solomon | April 22, 2017 | Last Updated: Apr 22 7:00 AM ET
“Let’s not pretend we’re in a global free market when it comes to agriculture,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finally told a persistent John Micklethwait, Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief, in an interview Thursday.
Trudeau had been bafflegabbing Micklethwait’s inquiry into Canada’s position on NAFTA and free trade, in an attempt to avoid admitting Canadian hypocrisy in preaching free trade while practicing protectionism.
The interview demonstrated Trudeau’s inability to counter the essential truth of President Donald Trump’s assessment that Canada has not been acting honourably. Pointing to Canada’s attempt to manipulate cross-border dairy trade, Trump had threatened on Tuesday to “make some very big changes or we are going to get rid of NAFTA for once and for all,” and Micklethwait noted that every Canadian family pays several hundred dollars more for their milk bill per year to protect Canada’s dairy industry.
Trudeau ultimately conceded Canada’s dairy protectionism, albeit with much-deserved awkwardness, since Canada’s dairy quota system has been Canada’s shame since it was introduced in 1970.
The quota system makes milk prohibitively expensive for poor families, it denies Canadian consumers the right to purchase diverse cheeses from around the world and it destroyed Canada’s once-great cheese industry, whose many small producers capitalized on milk surpluses to make world-famous cheddars - Ontario alone once supplied England with half of its cheddar cheese imports.
Over the decades, the dairy lobby’s hold in Canada’s corridors of power was unshakable, surviving intense pressure in numerous trade negotiations under numerous governments. But its hold is shaking today.
Under pressure from Trump, Canada may finally do the right thing for the Canadian consumer and the Canadian economy by removing this albatross, and forcing Canada’s politicians to put on their big-boy pants. Many are now noting the irony that Trump’s desire to make America great gives long-suffering Canadians hope for an end to the dairy quotas.
Trump’s blunt talk and uncompromising stances are also highlighting other failures of Canadian policy.
Trump expects Trudeau to put on his big-boy pants with respect to NATO, too, where Canada has never honoured its commitment to contribute our share of military spending - two per cent of our GDP - to the defence of the free world. Instead, while Canada pays lip service to the need to stand strong in Ukraine and the Middle East, we contribute just half as much as pledged, leaving our own military in disrepair and expecting the United States to pick up the difference and to be our protector.
Canada has a sense of entitlement that Trump, in his undiplomatic way, is exposing.
His plan to renegotiate NAFTA - and to walk away from it if the renegotiation didn’t serve America’s interests - was widely met in Canada with indignation and outrage, as if we had an entitlement to the U.S. market.
True to form, we also responded with praise for the glories of free trade and contempt for America’s backward turn to protectionism. Yet Canada remains one of the West’s great bastions of protectionism, barring foreign ownership of banking and other major sectors and unable to achieve even internal free trade among our provinces, despite 150 years of trying.
The provinces themselves don’t accept the provisions of NAFTA, cannot be bound by them and haven’t honoured them.
Until Trump began a rescue of our energy sector by approving the Keystone XL pipeline, the federal and provincial governments were so inward looking, and so beholden to provincial politics, that they couldn’t even muster the courage to proceed with much-needed pipelines to either the Atlantic or Pacific that would allow Alberta oil to flow to European and Asian markets.
Canada wasn’t always a snowflake country. In the previous century, we were far more self-reliant - economically successful, despite the American protectionism that we then faced, and confidently entering both world wars long before the Americans. We wore big-boy pants then. So did our farmers. Trump may force us to wear them again.
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
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