This is an excellent article, Sean! I used to read your blog but somehow have missed that you have a Substack now? Anyway, I totally agree with you about this. Except for this: didn’t free trade turn out to be a good thing for Canada to have with the US and isn’t that why things are looking so bad here now that we’re losing our agreements? Bernie Sanders (who I so wish wasn’t sidelined and could have run and been president) didn’t want to impose tariffs like Trump is doing. I see what you mean about the middle class disappearing in the US when jobs went overseas. That definitely happened. But there were also other factors like Reagan. Reagan began the age of “government is bad” and started deregulation of everything including environmental standards and union busting and getting rid of social programs. It was the end of the FDR era that lasted so many decades of it being possible to easily get a job and buy a house and have a secure life. Ronald Reagan stopped all that and things started to go really badly unless you were rich. Maybe globalization was part of all this but as you said, free trade was initially a leftist ideal. Free trade has been good for Canada, hasn’t it? Anyway this has got me interested in reading more about it. I subscribe to Robert Reich and Paul Krugman’s substacks and those two especially go into lots of history of how we got here starting with Ronald Reagan. Now I will read your most recent post! Keep it up!
Hi Laurie, thanks! I just moved this blog over to Substack; this is my first post on it since the move. I've also been writing another Substack about food and farming for the past year called Farmer's Table.
I don't know if free trade with the US has been on the balance good for Canada or not. Access to such a large market certainly has its benefits. It also comes with the downside of possibly being swamped by their much larger economy, and becoming overly dependent. The economic shocks people are worried about as the result of an end to free trade might have a lot to do with our economy being structured with the assumption of free access to that market built in. If we now need to reorient, it's going to be a tough transition, but maybe we will come out of it for the better in the end. I think Canada has a tendency to be a "branch plant" for the US, or to overly focus on raw materials exports. If we couldn't just easily ship our raw materials to the US for processing, perhaps we would be forced to invest in the processing ourselves, and in the process capture more value from those materials.
In any case, any agreements we have made with the US now appear to not be worth the paper they are written on, so I don't see how we can fall into the same trap again of assuming the US will always be there to trade with.
I read Robert Reich too, and agree there are many factors for our current economic situation, and globalization is just one of them.
This is an excellent article, Sean! I used to read your blog but somehow have missed that you have a Substack now? Anyway, I totally agree with you about this. Except for this: didn’t free trade turn out to be a good thing for Canada to have with the US and isn’t that why things are looking so bad here now that we’re losing our agreements? Bernie Sanders (who I so wish wasn’t sidelined and could have run and been president) didn’t want to impose tariffs like Trump is doing. I see what you mean about the middle class disappearing in the US when jobs went overseas. That definitely happened. But there were also other factors like Reagan. Reagan began the age of “government is bad” and started deregulation of everything including environmental standards and union busting and getting rid of social programs. It was the end of the FDR era that lasted so many decades of it being possible to easily get a job and buy a house and have a secure life. Ronald Reagan stopped all that and things started to go really badly unless you were rich. Maybe globalization was part of all this but as you said, free trade was initially a leftist ideal. Free trade has been good for Canada, hasn’t it? Anyway this has got me interested in reading more about it. I subscribe to Robert Reich and Paul Krugman’s substacks and those two especially go into lots of history of how we got here starting with Ronald Reagan. Now I will read your most recent post! Keep it up!
Hi Laurie, thanks! I just moved this blog over to Substack; this is my first post on it since the move. I've also been writing another Substack about food and farming for the past year called Farmer's Table.
I don't know if free trade with the US has been on the balance good for Canada or not. Access to such a large market certainly has its benefits. It also comes with the downside of possibly being swamped by their much larger economy, and becoming overly dependent. The economic shocks people are worried about as the result of an end to free trade might have a lot to do with our economy being structured with the assumption of free access to that market built in. If we now need to reorient, it's going to be a tough transition, but maybe we will come out of it for the better in the end. I think Canada has a tendency to be a "branch plant" for the US, or to overly focus on raw materials exports. If we couldn't just easily ship our raw materials to the US for processing, perhaps we would be forced to invest in the processing ourselves, and in the process capture more value from those materials.
In any case, any agreements we have made with the US now appear to not be worth the paper they are written on, so I don't see how we can fall into the same trap again of assuming the US will always be there to trade with.
I read Robert Reich too, and agree there are many factors for our current economic situation, and globalization is just one of them.
Anyway, thanks for reading and commenting!