Opinion: Crandall - "We need to detach ourselves"

Stephen Harper is right.

He is, right now, at a political convention, even though he is out of active political office.

He just said, at that conference, that Canada should not be so highly tied to the United States in matters of trade, and this time of trade turmoil with the U.S. is a perfect time to do something about it. It is just that!

The U.S. Ambassador to Canada, at the same conference, said that the U.S. cannot sustain the huge federal debt that they have, and he’s right. I’ve been crowing about that for months now, saying that the U.S. is much closer to bankruptcy than most people know. But Trump knows it and, I suspect, has known it for a long time, and it’s the truth that nobody likes to talk about.

But when our countries are so integrated in every way, it’s hard for the giant in financial trouble to fix it without hurting the little country next door, which is us.

So what Harper is saying is that we need to be doing business with a lot of other countries than just the U.S., and that would include getting rid of the inter-provincial trade barriers that have been in place in Canada since forever. It’s mighty strange that we have let a system develop that would make it easier for someone in, for example, Manitoba, to sell to someone in Nebraska than it would to sell to someone in Alberta. And these names here are just examples; put in any names of provinces or states that you want, the story is the same. The trade barriers keep Canadians from developing markets within Canada. How stupid is that! And you watch, a year from now, most of those barriers will be gone.

And who is to thank for that? If you hate Trump, you don’t want me to tell you who we should thank. But it’s very much the case that Canadian politicians didn’t get it done, and never would have!

So what is going to happen on the August 1st deadline for getting a trade deal with the U.S.?

Not much.

A deal won’t be done by then, but you know what? The sun will still come up in the east and go down in the west. Trump may huff and puff, but it will come to nothing. The successor of the old North American Free Trade Agreement, agreements that go by various names, will still dictate most of the dealings between our two countries and, in the end, as the U.S. Ambassador to Canada says, the details may be different, but the common threads of past trade deals will rule the day. NAFTA will get updated again, just like it would have pre-Trump.

But what should happen besides negotiating the best deal that we can with the Americans? We should do what Harper is saying. Start pulling away from the U.S. and become less dependent on the easy trade deals with the U.S., because we have learned that trading partners can sometimes become belligerent. And Trump is very much belligerent. Tough for all the U.S. trading partners, while very much right for America. He’s looking after his people; we have to look after ourselves.

And how do we do that?

For one thing, we have to improve our infrastructure. Our trade transportation systems. Our pipelines must be on Canadian soil. Our ports must be located where they are effective. Our railways and highways must be modern and functional.

I have to tell you a little story here.

When I was a little kid in Alberta, I would occasionally be in the post office when you weren’t sure if you were in the post office or the chicken house, because the noise from the back of the post office was clearly that of little chicks chirping. It’s happened in our Golden post office too, and probably still does. I hope so, because even as a kid, I thought it was effective transportation in getting essential items from, in that case, a hatchery, to a Canadian poultry producer. It sounded funny, but it worked!

So we have to improve our infrastructure.

We also simply have to start business relationships with countries other than the U.S. We have to increase our business volumes with Mexico, with Poland, with Japan and Korea. Then there is India, a huge country with which we share British Commonwealth roots. And Chile, Portugal and more.

Thirdly, we need to increase manufacturing in Canada. Exactly what Trump is trying to do in the U.S. Granted, we are a much smaller country than they are, but we still buy lots of blue jeans and bearings every year.

And a close cousin to increased manufacturing is to increase agricultural production. We need to replace California lettuce and avocados with B.C. grown lettuce and avocados, produced in greenhouses which may need to be heated in the winter with natural gas that the U.S. will not be buying.

And could we do it?

We could. And those of us who have seen more summers and winters than many of you will remember hearing from some of our parents and grandparents that most people who lived on farms during the Great Depression of the 1930s lived pretty well during those years. Nobody on farms went hungry because they were self-sufficient. Yet here we are today wanting to have some lettuce on our hamburgers, and we have to buy it a thousand miles away and truck it all the way up here.

We have some work to do! Some serious work, detaching ourselves from the U.S. of A. Not completely, of course, but we must be less closely tied than we have been.

Duane Crandall is a retired newspaper publisher, having owned and operated The Golden Star from 1982 – 1987 and the Golden News from 1992 – 2003. He served as MLA for Columbia River-Revelstoke from 1986 to 1991.