Yesterday’s International Merchandise Trade Annual Review from StatsCan confirms the Mel Watkins thesis that Canada is rapidly reverting to its historical role as a commodity producer for the global economy. http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/070508/d070508a.htm From 2002, the Canadian dollar began to appreciate rapidly against the US dollar (and Asian currencies tied to the US dollar) in response to a commodity price boom, itself […]
Read moreMarc’s recent post prompted me to look at transcripts from the Senate hearings on “issues dealing with interprovincial barriers to trade.” The following passage caught my attention: The Chairman: Let me suggest something that tantalized me when I first looked at this question well over 30 years ago, and more recently — the economics of it. I think one of […]
Read moreA new edited volume, Whose Canada?: Continental Integration, Fortress North America, and the Corporate Agenda, by Ricardo Grinspun and Yasmine Shamsie, has just come out, featuring many of your favourite left-wing writers. The full book is out from McGill-Queen’s University Press, and can also be purchased through the CCPA. The table of contents can be viewed here. The synopsis follows: […]
Read moreFor more on the themes highlighted below by Jim, my note on trade balances and jobs is now available through the CCPA.
Read moreWell, I finally got my name into the Australian papers. So I guess I can come back to Canada now. (We’re flying home, sigh, in another few weeks.) I worked with the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (sister union, sectorally and politically, to the CAW) to produce a critique of the proposed Australia-China free trade agreement. We used a similar “job […]
Read moreEveryone knows globalization is an irresistible worldwide process enveloping every economy, including Canada’s, in its market-driven tentacles. Right? Wrong. In fact, since 2000, Canada’s economy has been curiously de-globalizing before our eyes. The importance of global markets to our employment and production has been diminishing, not increasing – and at a remarkable pace. Year-end GDP numbers for 2006, recently released […]
Read moreThis week, I am back home in Saskatchewan, where debate on TILMA is really heating up. (My location and time zone also explain why Andrew filled in for me on today’s Labour Force Survey.) Brad Wall leads the Saskatchewan Party (the renamed Conservatives) and hence the Official Opposition. While some TILMA proponents have withdrawn from the deeply flawed Conference Board […]
Read moreThe following note, including tables, is available on the Canadian Labour Congress website: Free trade was promoted to Canadians on the famous promise of “jobs, jobs, and more jobs†and is widely defended on the basis that Canada’s large trade surplus with the US contributes to Canadian employment. Meanwhile, American commentators are concerned that the US trade deficit displaces American […]
Read more“Balkanization of our national economic space . . . thicket of provincial barriers.” – Conference Board of Canada, Mission Possible, 2007 “Our federation has been a ‘mini global economy’ for decades. There are virtually no internal barriers to labour and capital mobility, and no tariff-like distortions on interprovincial trade.” – Robin Boadway, “National Tax Policy for an International Economy: Comments,” […]
Read moreAdvantage Canada is the “economic plan” released with November’s Economic and Fiscal Update. In reading through it yesterday, I was struck by its statements about a couple of “free trade” agreements. Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA) Marc and I demonstrate that there are few tangible examples of trade barriers between provinces and no evidence that such barriers entail significant […]
Read moreYesterday, the Conservatives announced three ballot options for an upcoming mail-in vote on the Canadian Wheat Board’s marketing of barley: (1) maintain single-desk marketing, (2) end the Board’s marketing of barley, or (3) have the Board market barley without its monopoly. In effect, Board elections have always been plebiscites on the organization’s role and supporters of single-desk marketing have always won. […]
Read moreWalden Bello, of Focus on the Global South, says yes: Globalization in Retreat Walden Bello When it first became part of the English vocabulary in the early 1990s, globalization was supposed to be the wave of the future. Fifteen years ago, the writings of globalist thinkers such as Kenichi Ohmae and Robert Reich celebrated the advent of the emergence of […]
Read moreStephen Gordon wonders whether eliminating the Canadian Wheat Board would be of benefit to consumers: The Canadian Wheat Board: Won’t anybody think of the consumers? The Canadian Wheat Board – a cartel for Canadian wheat producers – is experiencing the sort of troubles that all cartels have to deal with at some point or another: some of its members believe […]
Read moreEllen Gould has noted that the Conference Board’s report projects gains for industries that are explicitly exempted from TILMA: utilities, energy, mining, forestry, and fishing. The Conference Board’s analysis was based on a “draft negotiators’ text” (see page 39). However, the actual agreement wholly or partly exempts the industries listed above (see pages 19-20 and 22). These exempt industries could conceivably still benefit from lower […]
Read moreThe Conference Board estimates that TILMA will add $4.8 billion to British Columbia’s economy. Even if one accepts the Conference Board’s assumptions, this figure should be $2.4 billion (as explained below). However, some of these assumptions are highly questionable. The Conference Board argues, “The commercial services and wholesale and retail trade industries will benefit from [TILMA]. Increased trade liberalization will […]
Read moreThe Government of British Columbia has finally released the Conference Board study projecting that TILMA will add $4.8 billion to the provincial economy. Seeing the study’s methodology (or lack thereof) makes this projection seem even sillier than Marc and I had suggested. The Conference Board “scored†eleven industries in seven regions on the following arbitrary scale of TILMA’s speculated impact […]
Read moreThe Dominion Institute has recruited twenty great Canadian thinkers to write about what the country might look like in 2020. The fourteen essays currently posted include Don Drummond’s neo-classical analysis of manufacturing and productivity and Jim Stanford’s excellent analysis of Canada’s reliance on natural resources. Jim’s main argument, that Canada’s unmanaged resource boom is damaging other industries and our natural environment, […]
Read moreIt seems to me that, compared to an international free-trade agreement, TILMA provides none of the potential benefits (i.e. tariff reductions) and all of the costs (i.e. regulations harmonized to the lowest common denominator and businesses suing governments). As Marc noted below, the Government of BC claims that TILMA could add $4.8 billion to provincial GDP. A Government of Quebec […]
Read moreHi Everyone… I promised I’d provide more details on our great debate with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade regarding trade economics, in particular the likely employment effects of their proposed Canada-Korea FTA. The federal critique variously described the CAW study (which predicted significant post-FTA job losses in the auto industry and other high-value sectors) with the following […]
Read moreThe bureaucrats at International Trade Canada seem to think that their job is to negotiate “free trade” deals with anyone who is willing to sit at the table opposite us. For years they have salivated at the idea of a Canada-EU trade agreement; they were among the first to hop on the WTO’s Doha Round bandwagon; and they were perhaps […]
Read moreWhen I was growing up on the farm in Alberta, our family had a saying: “If you throw something out into the dark and hear a squeal, it means you hit the pig.” (OK, I didn’t really grow up on a farm in Alberta. But I visited one once.) That’s how I feel about the Department of Foreign Affairs and […]
Read moreThis is a column by Kim Pollock of the Steelworkers (ex IWA) in BC re the recent US Trade Court Ruling. I was out of the country at the time, but it strikes me that the basic issue (an un-necesary softwood lumber deal) has been incredibly ignored by the mainstream national media. Our lumber industry is about to be hammered […]
Read moreWhat does a ballot initiative in four US states next month have to do with interprovincial trade in Canada? The answer is that both are attacks on the capacity of governments to regulate in the public interest, based on a theory known as “regulatory takings”. The “regulatory takings” movement is more well known south of the border, and is encapsulated […]
Read moreThe prospect of a free trade deal with South Korea has set off a mini-debate at Stephen Gordon’s Worthwhile Canadian Initiative. Jim Stanford’s column in the Globe prompted this post from Stephen: Mercantilism at the Globe and Mail Courtesy of Jim Stanford: Why the rush to ink more deals? Where free trade is concerned, Canada is getting worse with practice: […]
Read moreI got a chuckle from the letter to the editor in the Globe and Mail that was a response to my recent column on the Harper government’s efforts to sign more free trade deals. Here is the letter: KEN RITTER CHAIR , BOARD OF DIRECTORS and CANADIAN WHEAT BOARD Winnipeg — Jim Stanford asks: Why The Rush To Ink More […]
Read moreMany progressive Canadian economists have noted recently that the share of GDP going to wages and salaries has dropped perilously low, as low as recorded statistics take us back in any event. This article from the Economist, via Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View, points out that this trend is not particular to Canada. They suggest that this is globalization at work, […]
Read moreStarting with the collapse of the Doha Round, Joseph Stiglitz beats up on US agriculture subsidies that distort world trade and undermine the position of farmers in the South. From The Guardian: The failure hardly comes as a surprise: the United States and the European Union had long ago reneged on the promises they made in 2001 at Doha to […]
Read moreby Jim Stanford I’ve now been in Melbourne Australia for one month of my 12-month sabbattical. It’s always interesting for an economist to live somewhere else and compare the micro-minutae of life. It’s a sure-fire way to drive your travelling partners nuts. Here are my main impressions of economic life on the bottom side of the planet so far: 1. […]
Read moreSince I just mentioned Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog, here is a short but sweet commentary on the loaded term “free trade”. Dean has been making this point for years, perhaps too often for my tastes, but it is a good one and worth repeating in the context of the Doha collapse: The WTO is Not Free Trade It […]
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