The last-minute deal giving Canada a 30-day reprieve from economy-killing tariffs has the whole country breathing a sigh of relief, but in many ways, the damage is already done.
In recent days — when U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff threat looked imminent and after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a long list of retaliatory tariffs — I’ve found myself scouring product labels for country-of-origin information as I unpack the groceries or pull my toiletries out of the cupboard in the morning.
It makes me feel dirty — not because I washed with imported soap, but because I don’t think I should have to care where the things I buy come from. I care about getting the best products at the lowest prices.
As consumers, that’s all that should really matter. Yet in recent decades, we’ve been inundated with faddish messages preaching the virtues of buying local.
Don’t buy those affordable garments, because they’re produced in Bangladeshi sweat shops. (Never mind if the kids working there will be left without food on their tables or forced into lives of prostitution if the factories close. That’s not our problem.)
And how dare you purchase fruits and vegetables grown in tropical climates when you can source locally grown organic produce at your neighbourhood farmers’ market for twice the price!
The latest “Buy Canadian” craze is merely an offshoot of these arguments, although thanks to Trump’s anti-Canadian rhetoric, it resonates far beyond the usual crowd of aging hippies and vegan soccer moms.
As Global News reported on Monday, even in the absence of tariffs, many consumers are consciously making the decision to buy Canadian products at the supermarket, and retailers are scrambling to affix bright “Proudly Canadian” stickers to domestic goods, or put “Buy Canada Instead” signs next to American products.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, of course. Consumers are free to make their purchasing decisions based on whatever criteria they like. But some grocers are actively taking foreign goods off store shelves and replacing them with Canadian alternatives.
This would have made sense if Canada’s countervailing tariffs had come into effect, making certain goods sourced from Canada or other countries cheaper in comparison. But removing products from store shelves simply because they crossed an international border will only serve to increase the cost of living and make our economy less efficient — essentially the same effects tariffs would have, but on a smaller scale.
Don’t get me wrong: this country makes lots of fine products. But there’s a reason why we’re heavily dependent on trade — and given the time of year, one only needs to look out the window to see what that is. Indeed, we would all do well to remember the benefits that international trade has brought.
When my grandmother was growing up, her family had to survive the harsh Alberta winters on a cellar full of potatoes and jams. Fresh fruits and vegetables were nowhere to be found. A mere two generations later, I’m living large, enjoying February with a fruit bowl full of Greek kiwis, California oranges and Colombian bananas.
Sure, modern technology — such as greenhouses, indoor farming and climate-controlled storage — allow countries with northern climates to grow some produce year-round, or to store harvested product for sale throughout the year. But this is often more costly and energy intensive than growing fruits and vegetables in more conducive climates and shipping them here.
The global market also prevents farmers and consumers from having to deal with severe price fluctuations resulting from depressed prices in years when the harvest is bountiful and shortages when crops are wiped out due to pestilence or natural disaster, as it gives us the ability to export excess supply to foreign markets and import when we can’t produce enough ourselves.
A similar situation exists when it comes to non-food-related items, as well. While Canada could theoretically produce just about anything, trade allows us to focus on what we do best and purchase the rest from elsewhere. Protectionism only serves to give us overpriced chickens and the CBC’s lineup of programs that no one watches.
Ironically, our national, media-fuelled push to get everyone to buy higher-priced Canadian goods and stop eating oranges is playing right into Donald Trump’s hands.
He wants the world to adopt a 19th-century mercantilist worldview — in which countries engage in economic warfare to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else — because that’s how he thinks, and because he believes that despite the damage it will cause, America will ultimately come out ahead.
More importantly for Trump, the current trade spat has established him as the dominant schoolyard bully. All it took was a couple of tweets and some jabs about turning Canada into the 51st state to plunge this country into crisis.
By giving into Trump’s demands over border security, Trudeau may have delayed the tariffs, but the threat is still there, giving the president the opportunity to lord it over our heads for the next month — probably longer, if recent events have taught us anything. Today, it’s about fentanyl, but tomorrow it could be about something completely different.
Trump’s ultimate point is that he has us under his thumb. Gunboat diplomacy works. The powerful do as they will and the weak submit.
The solution is not to cave to Trump’s mercantilist thinking, but to double down on free trade and the postwar economic order, which have brought tremendous benefits for this country.
If the Americans are going to treat us as the enemy for the next four years, we need to do what we did the last time we faced a serious threat from the U.S. and strengthen our ties with Great Britain and other allies.
We need to revive talks over a Canada-United Kingdom free trade agreement. We need to do away with protectionist supply management policies and forge freer trade with other countries. And we need to build pipelines and ports to export our oil and gas around the globe.
What we don’t need is to buy into Trump’s protectionist mindset and start closing ourselves off from the world.
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