A quarter century ago, I was tear-gassed protesting free trade

Now that Trump’s tariffs may signal the beginning of the end of globalization, do I get to say, “I told you so”?

In April of 2001, I hopped on a chartered bus in Toronto and rode ten hours to Quebec City, where the walls of the old city had merged with a new, 6km long security perimeter. It was guarded by 6,000 police, and had been erected to ensure the unimpeded functioning of the third Summit of the Americas. Behind this three meter high fence, the 34 heads of state of every country in the Americas (except Cuba) had gathered to try to hammer out a hemisphere-wide free trade deal. We were there, in the tens of thousands, to protest it and, for some, to try to physically break in and stop it.

These heads of state certainly stood at the summit of power. And they were organizing the economy to benefit those at the summit of wealth. Fitting that they should gather at the summit of this hill town, and even name their gathering a “summit”.

The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) was to be the culmination of the 1988 Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement, and 1992’s NAFTA, which brought Mexico into the fold.

The protest was also a culmination of previous anti-globalization protests, which began in North America with the famous Battle of Seattle in 1999, where thousands of protesters succeeded in largely shutting down a meeting of the World Trade Organization, setting the template for future confrontations.

The FTAA would never come into existence, and the anti-globalization movement would quickly fade away just five months later, when terrorists flew planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, and the world reoriented itself towards the War on Terror.

The ambition of summits like the one in Quebec City, and the militancy of the protests that rose up against them, seem now like visions from another world. That large numbers of world leaders used to gather together, with hopes of crafting grand, unifying agreements; and that broad social movements could coalesce around arcane economic debates and inspire people to take to the streets – these things seem unimaginable now.

It was a post-Cold War world, when the G was briefly 8, and progress seemed inevitable. Globalization was, it was argued, the height of progress, and an unstoppable force.

It was also a world where the internet was still just a curious novelty; people still read books and met in person. It was Generation X’s – my generation’s – coming of age. We didn’t have a war (thankfully) to protest, like our parents in the 60’s, so we picked this as our fight. It wouldn’t turn out to be a long one. The War on Terror quickly brought a chilling effect on dissent. And we would soon have new wars to protest that seemed more urgent than trade agreements.

We lost that fight against globalization. By the time the anarchist Black Block even smashed their first window, it was already well underway. We can see now what thirty-plus years of it has wrought. A growing class of millions of left-behinds in the US who, in their justifiable anger, have cast their lot with the one leader who promised them relief: Donald J. Trump.

Bernie Sanders could have been their savour, offering them not a regression to the past, but a step forward into a new kind of country that cares for those in need. But the Democrats, beholden to wealthy donors, sabotaged him.

Instead Trump filled this void. He promised he’d bring their jobs back, but he also promised to score victories in a culture war that had long been used as a cudgel by the Democrats, and liberals generally, to shame these left-behinds.

So this is what globalization has given us: a large segment of Americans, whose good union jobs have been shipped overseas, pissed off and ready to vote for a man who promises to be their “retribution”. The fact that he is profoundly undemocratic, a criminal, immoral, a bully, a grifter, a con-man, a racist, a misogynist, and the oligarch-in-chief, is not enough to outweigh three decades of degradation under the machinations of globalization. They want their jobs back, they want their lives back, and tariffs are how they hope to get them.

Free trade with the United States is likely over. And as the world’s economic superpower, this could be a trend that will spread. The tide may start shifting globally over the globalization consensus.

The US has already been moving in that direction since Trump’s first undisciplined term. Even Biden didn’t undo Trump’s tariffs. Now Trump will ratchet them up even more in his second, more disciplined administration. They are simultaneously his tactic for bringing jobs back to the United States, and his main foreign policy weapon for bending recalcitrant nations to his will. That’s why he has repeated called “tariff” the “most beautiful word in the dictionary.”

The US has had over a generation now to experiment with free trade, and the reelection of Donald Trump signals that the nation has decided it was a failed experiment. While it created a lot of cheap goods for US consumers, as imports from China and other countries with much lower wages surged, it also hollowed out the economy of vast sections of the country, as manufacturing happily fled to those lower wage, lower regulation countries.

This is the trade-off of free trade. Its boosters in the 90’s claimed that the theory of “comparative advantage” proved its benefits would outweigh the costs. Gen Xers like me, and the trade unions, left-wing political parties, church groups, and many others said they wouldn’t. It’s looking like we were right – only in ways we didn’t predict.

We predicted the job losses – even globalization’s cheerleaders acknowledged there would be losers – but we didn’t foresee the rise of a totalitarian leader like Trump being the eventual result. Globalization exacerbated the division between winners and losers in the US and fed into the polarized nightmare we see today.

Going back to the beginning of the concept, free trade was a liberal cause, with conservatives opposing it. But by the time a Canadian federal election was fought over it, in 1988, the Conservative Party was in favour, with the Liberals and NDP against. After the “no” side lost, the Liberals got back on board with the free trade agenda, and a consensus. emerged worldwide across the political spectrum – at least for the ruling elites – that free trade would lift economies and promote peace. Free trade is a complex enough idea that it transcends left and right.

For those of us who still stood against it, it wasn’t so much free trade as a concept that we took issue with, as the devilish details of the agreements made under the “free” trade banner – details like the ability of corporations to sue democratically elected governments over decisions that could adversely impact their international investments. We feared a race to the bottom, as nations competed to lower employment and environmental standards in order to attract foreign investment. At its heart, we saw these international trade liberalization agreements as ultimately geared towards catering to the desires of transnational corporations at the expense of regular people. They greased the wheels of the freer movement of trade and capital, but left human beings largely trapped behind national boundaries, creating a two-tiered global order where money was free to move but people were not. “Free” trade was a freedom for only one class.

Globalization has benefited developing countries like China, whose economy has grown more than 30 times larger over the past three decades, so much so that the US now views them as a strategic rival. The West thought that economic integration with China would lead inevitably to liberal democracy in the Middle Kingdom, but the Chinese continued to chart their own course, increasing at odds with the West. So not only did globalization destroy much of the American middle class, but it also literally manufactured a replacement for Russia in an emergent new Cold War.

Canada should probably get used to a pre-1988 trade environment with the US. Protectionism is back. We’ve been given a one month reprieve on tariffs, but Trump probably is just seeing how much more he can extract from us with threats of a 25% tariff, before he imposes a smaller one – maybe 10%, like the one now on China. We should just accept that this is the world we now live in and get to work adapting. Free trade with the US, and falling for their line about a “rules based international order”, lulled us into an over-dependency on selling into the American market. Now we’ve got to rebuild our internal market, while also diversifying our portfolio of trade partners.

Who knows, this might end up being a good thing for Canada. We have not been feeling like much of a real country lately. Polls have suggested that our “deep emotional attachment” and “pride” in our country had dropped to 30 year lows by the end of 2024 (from 65% to 49%, and from 78% to 58% respectively). Trump perhaps sniffed out this weakness, saw a Prime minister on his last legs, and decided to attack, with an economic assault he hoped would topple us from independent nation to 51st state.

But it appears to have backfired. Both emotional attachment and national pride have rebounded in Canada by 9-10% in the space of a couple of months, with, surprisingly, Quebec leading the charge. In a stroke, Trump has dealt a blow to Quebec separatists, reinvigorated our national pride and unity, and seriously jeopardized the easy majority the Conservatives, under Pierre Poilievre, seemed destined for, with their 25 point lead now narrowed to seven against the Liberals. Presumably Trump would much prefer Poilievre, with whom he shares an anti-woke and small government worldview, than Trudeau, whom he once called a “far-left lunatic” and the illegitimate son of Fidel Castro. But his clumsy aggression has been a gift to his opponents.

Canadians had grown complacent, with our isolated geography and friendly relations with our only neighbour. This could be the thing that shocks us out of our complacency – that stops us feeling like, as the novelist Yann Martel once said, “the greatest hotel on Earth”, and more like a group of 40 million plus people rooted to this land and engaged in a common project of living well together.

So do I get to say, “I told you so” now? I guess so, although there’s no satisfaction in it. It’s a Pyrrhic victory. This new spate of protectionism will certainly bring some jobs home, while raising prices for some goods, but it’s still driven by the interests of the same 1% who drove the free trade train from the end of the last century into this one. We still face the same challenges we fought against in the streets of Quebec City 24 years ago: how to break the self-reinforcing upward spiral of great wealth and great power, and liberate the people from their depredations.

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