The Patronizing Bully

It's tough to live beside a bully. A bully that sometimes puts on a nice-guy persona, but never lets you forget that his advantage is what counts, not your aspirations. If you can manage to convince the bully that it is also in his self-interest to agree to good relations between you, and results encourage that belief, then he may relent, and relations may become reasonably acceptable.

Being a bully, however, he makes certain that you know he can pull the plug at any time.

And thus it is with Canada-U.S. trade relations. American subsidies to agriculture and various types of signal enterprises are well enough known internationally, but this has never stopped the United States from accusing its trade partners of seeking advantage through themselves subsidizing industries like, for example, Canadian lumber. And then the U.S. Congress loves to play the heavy, invoking hierarchy.

For the interests of the United States and its states and its lobbyists trump any deal made for free trade between countries, in recognition of their competing interests and trade advantages. Any country signing a trade agreement with the United States knows that there will be exemptions, and if one wishes to trade with that giant market, one must be prepared to accept the negatives with the positives.

The positives are those advantages in trade that the U.S. Congress will permit another country to relish, without relinquishing its supreme right to invoke the interests of the U.S. as paramount, when State or industry lobbyists strenuously make their case against the importation of other countries' goods that impact deleteriously on their own.

America is struggling to recover from a financial collapse its own corporate free-enterprisers foisted on the international economy. In its extremis, it has focused on rescuing itself from the disaster of a flailing economy and a population that has been victimized by the established financial institutions who care little for the common good, and much for their own bottom line.

Steadily rising unemployment and a weak consumer market, along with a collapsed housing market has decreed that the Obama administration invoke executive privilege and it has done so with questionable success, seeming to reward the very establishments that spectacularly failed the country, and tormenting the population by demanding sacrifice of them, not the perpetrators of capitalism's default.

In the process of which, the usual protectionist Democratic mindset has re-emerged, to circle the wagons and exclude foreign interests, trade agreements or not, while rewarding the home market and hoping to boost employment by that route. Hence the stimulus package (placing a huge mortgage on the country's future) and its associated "buy American" pledge, so discomfiting to U.S. trade partners.

Canada, in particular, since Canada thinks its neighbourly role and its distinct position of supplying the United States with a huge proportion of its energy needs, places it in a strategic position to demand exclusion from "buy American". The implementation of which has already resulted in lost jobs and opportunities for trade expansion, along with factory closures. This was not supposed to happen.

In a perfect world, it would not. A trading country of 30-million people becomes highly dependent on the good-nature-persona of a 300-million consuming nation that often shows its bully side. Thus, Canada seeks an exemption, to set it aside from all other trading nations, in recognition of the truly singular trade relationship and interrelatedness of industry between the two countries.

Even if a semi-exemption were to be granted, it would still be to the advantage of the United States, as much as it would be to Canada. There are also American jobs dependent on the continued free flow of goods and services between Canada and the United States. It is the short-sightedness and ignorance of reality evinced by the Democrats that exemplifies this current situation.

Canada does have some persuasive weapons in her trade arsenal of negotiations. But this country has always been loathe to push the bully on the block too hard, lest that bully turn around and simply shove us off the block entirely. Were that to happen, the bully would discover, belatedly, that he too has fallen off the block.

Pity, isn't it, that reasonableness falls by the wayside when panic sets in.