Canada’s scattergun approach to bilateral trade deals should be reconsidered to make it more focused and flexible, says the executive director of the George Morris Centre.
Bob Seguin, for decades a senior official in Ontario agriculture and trade departments, wrote in a recent analysis of federal trade policy that the country needs a “bolder, more ambitious Canadian agri-food trade policy.”
It would include focusing on bilateral trade deals with major players such as the European Union, India and Japan that offer significant sales potential rather than jumping at every chance for a deal, no matter how small the potential market.
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“Even smaller agreements consume Canada’s limited human resource capacity for such negotiations and for implementation,” he said.
“We really need to be more strategic in deciding what deals are worth investing resources in.”
Seguin also said Canada must abandon its insistence that it cannot discuss supply management import protections in trade negotiations. Since 2005, federal governments have said they are bound by a unanimous House of Commons resolution that ordered Canada to refuse to endorse any trade deal that erodes import restrictions for the dairy, poultry and egg sectors.
“Canada’s existing balanced position is a safe one for some agri-food participants,” he wrote in the analysis published by the centre in Guelph, Ont.
“Yet it is not a realistic one given the market opportunities facing this sector globally and domestically. It is not a realistic one given changing global competition.”
He said in an interview that the government should reconsider the 2005 ban on discussing compromise on sensitive product tariffs.
“It was a resolution of the House, but governments change positions all the time once they consider new evidence,” he said.
“They really have to consider what potential losses there would be, what potential lost opportunities, how they balance out and what changes are happening in those industries, trade deals or not.”
Seguin said part of the domestic discussion would be an analysis of whether refusal to make supply management part of the negotiation makes economic sense and whether gradual changes could be managed through government policy.
“I think designing a more realistic policy is doable and we have to have this discussion,” he said. “We’re fooling ourselves if we think we can avoid it.”
In his analysis, Seguin said Canada’s agricultural industry should put more money and resources into its capacity to analyze the potential benefits and losses in proposed trade deals, including how to protect negotiated market gains for exporters “from future shift in policy by our competitors who will want to protect their internal markets with similar creativity as Canada has employed in the past.”
