It seems everyone these days loves Gerry. That’s Gerry Ritz, the present federal agriculture minister, about whom I have heard nothing but glowy stuff recently from farm organizations. A couple of weeks ago I received a newsletter from the Canada Beef Export Federation with Gerry and two organization luminaries beaming out of a photograph about Gerry’s being given an award by the federation for his efforts in opening up foreign markets. Here’s what they said in September, when they gave him the award:
“The great work of Minister Ritz in going out to the international markets and actively
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and aggressively pursing commercially-viable access for Canadian beef and veal has
been outstanding,” says Gib Drury, CBEF Board Chair. “The Minister has put a new
impetus on our market access efforts, and we are proud that his great contribution is
the first to be recognized by the Jim Graham Award.”
Well, that’s certainly better than having buns, abuse and scorn thrown at you, which is often the lot of Canadian ag ministers! Golly.
Last week I was told by JoAnne Buth of the Canola Council of Canada that they’re delighted with his commitment to the fight against Chinese restrictions on Canadian canola because of (bogus?) blackleg concerns. “Gerry and his people have been really great,” she told me.
He certainly seems to be actively out there waving the Canadian flag in foreign markets, and regardless of policy positions, that seems to be making a lot of prairie farmers happy. What’s better than standing proudly by the flag?
It reminds me of those days in the 1990s, when Jean Chretien would head off on those Team Canada trade missions all around the world, promoting Canada and signing Memorandums of Understanding and other totally commitmentless documents that made for lots of good news stories but probably resulted in few real deals. Still, it stirred the heart to see the Prime Minister get the point that business, trade and the international marketplace have always defined this nation, from its Euro-origin as a place from which to extract beaver fur to our later prairie role as the breadbasket of the world to our heroic distribution of K-Tel products around the globe in the 1970s (one of Winnipeg’s great contributions to world culture) to our present multi-producted export exuberance. This nation is all about trade.
Still, I must say we don’t quite seem as confident, as defiantly optimistic, as cheerfully indomitable about opening markets as we were when we were still a core part of the British Empire, and the world still made sense. Those were halcyon days, when if someone closed their market to you, you did the natural thing: 
Yes, you sent another gunboat down the river! That’d show ’em!! And usually, it did. The Royal Navy usually just needed to show the flag, lob a few cannonballs at the local potentate’s fort, and quickly: Free Trade!
In fact, one of the most notable examples of gunboat diplomacy was used with China in 1839. Those confounded Chinese just wouldn’t play cricket with trade and not only didn’t open their markets to us, but also treated our emissaries in a rather snotty manner. (That time it wasn’t blackleg: it was opium. The Chinese didn’t want British traders from India dumping huge amounts of opium into their population. What rot!!!! That would be like the U.S. government trying to stop the flow of cocaine from South America. That’ll never happen!) Well, we jolly well showed them! Gunboats were deployed, Chinese ships were sunk, Chinese forts were blasted and soon we had a deal which gave us Hong Kong (then a fishing village) and freer access to the Chinese market. And the Chinese people got all the benefits of our opium dealers. Hurrah! (They also got Hong Kong back a few years back, which was no longer a sleepy fishing village but one of the most fabulous creations of British capitalism and Chinese people’s dynamism.)
It seems highly unlikely we’ll try the same approach with the Chinese this time, for these reasons: 1) We don’t have gunboats; 2) The Chinese probably do; 3) They’re equally technologically advanced to us and wouldn’t be easily overawed by our fearsome appearance off their coast; 4) We’re just too darned nice and want to be friends with everybody.
The Chinese aren’t appearing too easy to intimidate these days, as they showed last week when they slapped Barack Obama in the face when he asked for a bit of currency exchange reasonableness. But with a nation so willing to play selfish trade games with nations like ours, you’ve got to wonder whether it’s worth rattling the sword a trifle more than we have been. The Yanks have done it with Chinese tires. Perhaps we could do it with children’s toys, or something else for which they have 10,000 export-dependent factories.
The Chinese have suddenly become very touchy about blackleg. Perhaps we could become extremely touchy about the semi-poisonous children’s toys they’ve been shipping to us. Remember 2007, when at Christmas we realized that a lot of Chinese-made toys were coloured with lead paint? That wasn’t such a cheery surprise. How about dog food? Remember how a mountain of (Canadian company commissioned) dog food was discovered to be poisonous because Chinese manufacturers had incorporated melamine in vegetable protein production? Not such a good thing to find out about “Made In China.” Dead pets and poisoned children aren’t what you expect to import from your partners.
But if I remember right, we reacted rather coolly and maturely and didn’t make a great big fuss about it all. Anything that was actually contaminated was gotten rid of, but we didn’t shut down all Chinese toy imports, or put a permanent ban on Chinese food products because of China’s obvious and continuing problems with product safety. Nope. We were willing to play cricket with them.
But with this blackleg business, if it lasts more than a couple of months, perhaps it’s time to send a bit of round shot across China’s bow. They don’t need to take our canola. But we don’t need to take their toys and food products. The Chinese want our market open to them. We want theirs open to us. Trade’s a two-way street. So if Stephen Harper comes up empty in December when he visits China, perhaps it’ll be time for him to visit the Admiralty and check out the state of the fleet. We may not have any gunboats, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have any barrels than could drop a few pounds of lead into Chinese waters.
