Freer trade has been the direction of global economic travel for a whole generation.
When I entered journalism in the 1980s, tariffs were touted as the enemy but wielded by American presidents like sabres against countries they identified as protectionist and anti-capitalist. The sort-of-free-market was the future.
This week, U.S. President Donald Trump sabred the Trans-Pacific Partnership, leaving it to bleed out on the world trade battlefield.
In the 1980s and 1990s, free markets were spoken of as a rising tide lifting all boats. Rather than depressing wages and opportunities for first-world working-classers, these would bring up the purchasing abilities of workers in places like Mexico.
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And those North Americans who assembled, forged or grew stuff would have new and better opportunities in the emerging, knowledge-based economies. No more grease under the fingernails for their children.
To some extent it has been true, except for that part about educating our nation for that new economy. Instead, provincial governments avoided meaningful investment in accessible, affordable education by buying our votes with talk of tax cuts and smaller government.
And now, anytime work, either knowledge or sweat-based, loses its location dependence in Canada and the United States, it migrates to where it costs pennies on the traditional North American working-class dollar.
Maquiladoras, duty-free labour parks, on the Mexican-American border, flourished after the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. Rust belt jobs migrated to lower-cost locations as trade barriers melted onto boardroom tables. Later on, as money found its own level with lower-cost labour and environmental standards, Chinese-made parts became Mexican assembled cars for northern neighbours. Jobs from Sarnia to Pittsburgh vanished as trade flourished.
American southern states slashed business taxes and deregulated labour, getting in on the race to the bottom of a globalized economy.
Canada’s economy is all about trade, and America is now all about blaming its crumbling empire on it.
Our journalists will be reporting on it. You can count on that.
