I don’t know which one of the Premier Bennett’s it was, (we had two Premier Bennetts, remember!) but either Wacky Bennett or his son, Bill Bennett, that told the story one day when the opposition was after him, that governments need a strong opposition in order to provide the best government to the people they serve. “Just like a kite,” he said, “needs a strong wind in order to fly its highest, governments need strong opposition.”
Now the above is not an exact quote, but it’s fairly close, and you get the idea.
I couldn’t help but think of that line last week when we heard that the trade talks had blown up and Trump had lost his mind with some of it, especially the silly idea of changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America.
As I heard what all had happened, the hope grew within me that the Americans don’t change their position on any of this. If they do, it will be so easy for Canada to settle right back into the ways things were before, which means staying dependent on the US.
That isn’t something we should want.
I hope we use Trump’s tariffs and threats to our advantage, which means developing our country to where it is never dependent on anyone else.
It’s not that I’m anxious to see our country go through the pains of weaning ourselves off the US, and we all know there will be some pain, but it seems to me that as long as we are hooked to the US we will never shake the vulnerability that the last year has shown us that we carry.
We must have pipelines, rail lines, highways or whatever it is that we need to get our products to world markets. One of the crazy things that exist today is that some of our transportation links, even to get some Canadian products to Canadian markets, go through the US. Now how smart was that? It wasn’t smart at all, but at the time it was easy, and easy is how we like it!
We don’t all like John A. MacDonald, and there are probably good reasons for that, but I think I am right in saying that he was the guy who insisted on the Canadian Pacific railway going on Canadian soil all the way to the west coast, after Canada had promised British Columbia a railway connection to eastern Canada as a part of BC joining our fledgling new country in 1871.
I don’t have all the details of why he took that position, but I think much of it was what he had learned about the Americans of that day, and we now find out that the Americans of today are much like their earlier politicians. Most of the spats between our two countries in those early years were over trade. What we are in now is nothing new, and it’s never going to change. So the sooner we bite the bullet and get our own infrastructure in place, the better we will be off.
This is not to say that we should or will stop trading with the US. That will never happen, the geography of the two countries will make sure of that. Water transportation on the oceans is the cheapest way of shipping anything if its going very far, but no ocean will ever be able to beat the freight costs of putting something on a truck and driving a few hundred miles with a crossing of a land border crossing on the way.
But we don’t have to do eighty percent of our business with one country if there are alternatives, and there are alternatives. If we can get our products to markets, the markets will buy them!
But you can’t sell something if you can’t deliver it.
We should not, however, think that even agreeing within ourselves, Canadians talking to Canadians, on where to put the necessary transportation corridors, will be easy. In fact, that’s probably why some of the Canadian freight today moves within Canada through the US. Trump will be gone and forgotten about by the time these corridors get agreed upon. There will be lots of reasons why we know we need to move our products to ports, but we also often want them built in someone else’s backyard.
I just read this morning of how one of the railways is trying to put a high speed rail link between Windsor and Quebec City and a lot of farmers are against it because of what it might do to their operations. And I’d be on the farmers side in this, but there must be a way of doing it so that it can work. I know it doesn’t always, which is why people get their backs up when they get steamrolled by governments or big business.
If you are not a youngster, you may recall when the Arrow Lakes area was all flooded as part of the Columbia River Treaty with the US. I think I am right in saying that there were a lot of good people displaced from the land they had been on for years, without reasonable and proper compensation. There’s no excuse for that.
Just from that short little story you can tell that the discussions, all right within Canada, could be long and difficult. But if Canada could build a railway from Ontario to the west coast in the 1800’s, especially through places like the Kicking Horse Canyon, we should be able to do it now.
So we need to get past all the challenges, hopefully fairly to everyone, and take Canada to a place where we can manage our resources to our own benefit. We have lots of minerals, lots of energy in the form of both oil and gas and electricity, we can be a rich country.
Do you know that a considerable amount of our petroleum products go to the US, who then re-sell them to other world markets at a profit? And why shouldn’t they, they have the ports that we don’t, so it is worth it for us to sell to them, knowing they will re-sell the stuff at a profit. What else are we going to do with it?
So we need our own ports, so we can sell to the world ourselves.
So please don’t hope that the trade talks get back on track, because getting back on track will be getting off track.
Hope instead, that out of all this fracas with the Americans, we take charge of our own business. Stand on our own two feet. Let the strong tariff challenges from the US take us, like a kite, to a higher level.
