The Most Important News Story No One is Paying Attention to

Well, some are, including an editorial in the National Post on Friday.  Public policy has a tremendous bore factor.  Start talking equalization programs and health care spending priorities and voters' eyes glaze over.  This is understandable up to a point, most people have better things to do than be experts on government policy, that's what they pay - in donations, taxes and tuition - academics and public think tankers to do.  What is poorly understood is that public policy, the below radar decisions made by ministers and bureaucrats, often have the largest impact on people's daily lives.  Perhaps once every few years, there is a landmark piece of legislation that has a comparable level of impact as the thousands of daily decisions made in Ottawa and the provincial capitals.  This, not Stephen Harper's wardrobe or Stephane Dion's lackluster communications skills, should be the real issue of this campaign.  Long before issues are brought to the voters attention, they are debated and dissected by a surprisingly small group of intellectuals and technocrats.  Years before Brian Mulroney dispatched Derek Burney to negotiate the Free Trade deal with the United States, a consensus had developed in public policy circles in favour of a deal.  A similar consensus has developed over the last decade for pushing for bilateral deals with several Latin American countries.  The prize, which until recently eluded Canadian trade officials, was a free trade deal with the European Union.  It seems, at long last, such a deal is in sight:

Canadian and European officials say they plan to begin negotiating a massive agreement to integrate Canada's economy with the 27 nations of the European Union, with preliminary talks to be launched at an Oct. 17 summit in Montreal three days after the federal election.

Trade Minister Michael Fortier and his staff have been engaged for the past two months with EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson and the representatives of European governments in an effort to begin what a senior EU official involved in the talks described in an interview yesterday as “deep economic integration negotiations.”

If successful, Canada would be the first developed nation to have open trade relations with the EU, which has completely open borders between its members but imposes steep trade and investment barriers on outsiders.

The proposed pact would far exceed the scope of older agreements such as NAFTA by encompassing not only unrestricted trade in goods, services and investment and the removal of tariffs, but also the free movement of skilled people and an open market in government services and procurement – which would require that Canadian governments allow European companies to bid as equals on government contracts for both goods and services and end the favouring of local or national providers of public-sector services.

It is difficult to underestimate the impact of such a deal.  As a pure trade deal, a conduit of capital, goods, services and skills, the opening up of a market of half a billion people to Canada, would be a landmark in our history.  It would do comparatively little to wean us off dependence of the American market, it would however turns us into an economic beach head.  A direct US-EU free trade deal is a political impossibility.  By gaining access to Canada, the world's two largest economic engines would have a back-door into each other's markets.  Just as London is North America's gateway into Europe, so Toronto and Montreal can become Europe's gateway into North America.  We do not, sadly, live a world of true free trade, the type that Sir Robert Peel and Richard Cobden would have recognized and approved, the kind Smith and Ricardo envisioned.  Instead we live in an age of "managed trade."  There are labour, health and environmental standards, exceptions and protocols.  The age of the welfare state cannot admit true free trade, which would undermine it.  This is the real danger of a Canada-EU deal, that the statism of the continent will be smuggled into Canada.  The European Union began as the Common Market, a continental free trade deal.  For all its potential this is a deal that Canada must approach with caution.  It will make Stephen Harper's legacy, long after the fluffy blue sweater is donated to the Sally Ann.