You’d never know it from the government’s near-total silence on the matter, but this week, Canada has a chance to shape the world order of the 21st century.
Negotiators from 11 countries are arriving in Ottawa for the next round of talks in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which begin today. Of course, it isn’t all up to us, but this key round is on our turf. And Canada’s positions on sticking points such as agricultural market access could help determine whether this experiment will succeed or fail.
There is at least a lip-service consensus in Canada now that free trade is a good thing, but what free trade ought to look like in the information age is a more difficult question.
As we have seen recently with Canada-Europe and Canada-South Korea, today’s trade deals include agreements on intellectual property, safety regulation, investment, labour and the environment, among other things. The line between trade policy and domestic policy is very fuzzy. So a deal like the TPP influences how businesses treat consumers and how governments treat citizens.
The advantage of a big deal like the TPP is that Canada gets to be there at the table with the major players and make a conscious choice about what it wants that new order to be. The likely alternative is not an end to liberalization; the likely alternative is that the major players would do their own bilateral deals and set the world’s regulatory and environment agenda in a haphazard, ad hoc way, with less opportunity for Canada to influence it.
Optimists say there could be something close to a deal for the TPP by the end of 2014. If that doesn’t happen, if regional deals go the way of the interminable World Trade Organization negotiations, Stephen Harper’s trade legacy starts to look a lot less significant.
The same is true if the countries come away from this process with a handful of insignificant concessions. The TPP could be the template for a new economic world order — and in many ways, a new political world order, too. Or it could fizzle.
Canada can’t do anything about the potential for delays in the U.S. Congress or about Japan’s agricultural protectionism. It could show ambition and vision by setting out a plan to end supply management in dairy, poultry and eggs, which irks our trading partners because it effectively closes off much of Canada’s market to imports.
If the government truly believes open borders are the future, it must know that supply management will die one day. So far, its strategy seems to be to kill it very slowly and hope no one notices until the death throes, which will be some other prime minister’s problem. The deal with Europe includes an increase in cheese imports. If the TPP or other deals keep nibbling away at supply management, dairy and poultry farmers might well get wise and turn against the government.
Meanwhile, farmers and food producers in Canada’s agricultural-export sectors might also get sick of being sacrificed to supply-management in trade negotiations; the less market access Canada gives up, the less its trading partners give up too. So the government’s political risk-aversion has its own domestic risks, as well as being an obstacle to regional negotiations.
A government with an ambitious trade agenda would announce its intention to help Canada’s dairy industry follow the path of New Zealand’s wildly successful dairy-exporting industry.
Or the path of Canada’s own wine industry, for which free trade was not death but new life. The demand for cheese and other exportable dairy products is certainly there in the TPP region. All of this could be win-win, for a government that truly had a vision to change how Canada does business in the world.
But then that isn’t Stephen Harper’s way. The rhetoric is ambitious but the policy is not.
