“The only thing that we’ve lost,” added Mulroney, “is some of our insecurities vis-à-vis competing with America and the rest of the world. Canadians were told repeatedly that we can’t compete with a country 10 times our size. The CBC, the Toronto Star, academics, you name it, they all said that Canada would be crushed. They have all been proven wrong.” In spades.
And that ladies and gentlemen is the most perceptive thing Brian Mulroney has ever said. The article is both informative and hilarious. I only partly remember the 1988 election, yet I do recall quite vividly the hysterical attacks on the Mulroney government and especially on Mulroney himself. John Turner, an otherwise sane and committed public servant, was accusing the sitting Prime Minister of being a traitor. The country, particularly the Left, went nuts in 1988.
From the perspective of a quarter century the whole thing is almost inexplicable. It isn't just that everything turned out well. The oddness of that time is how worked up people got about a trade agreement. Seriously. It's an international trade agreement. The Harper Tories have signed quite a few, including an important deal with the EU. It's barely headline news. But way back then it was the beginning of the end of Canada, if the good and great of the Canadian Cultural Establishment were to be believed.
Adding more distance to the passage of time is the demographic revolution that has taken place since, a revolution kicked into high gear by Mulroney not Trudeau. The Canada of 1988 was a much whiter and far more WASPish place than it is today. The Canadian WASP is an odd creature. Genial to a fault, decent, hard working and subdued in manner and lifestyle. He does, however, have one terrible weakness: A paranoid fear of the United States.
The Punjabi, the Vietnamese and the Filipino immigrant could not tell a Loyalist from a lolipop. The strange pyscho-drama that has consumed the Canadian elite since Simcoe landed is now, mostly, over. The new Canadians have no fear of the old enemy America. There are no intergenerational flashbacks to the Battle of Queenston Heights. The Americans are just the loud neighbour to the south. It is not entirely coincidental that free trade was at last brought to Canada by an Irish Catholic, supported by a phalanx of Quebecois. Neither group ever really feared America. Among them there was never that nagging sense of imminent cultural absorption.
Certain caveats should be made. The deal wasn't a free free trade deal, it was a relaxation of trade restraints that opened up large sections of the Canadian market to American competition. The full impact of the deal was also minimized by the gradual devaluation of the Canadian dollar. For much of the 1990s the dollar was below 80 cents US. Still its economic impact was formidable. It's psychological impact was even deeper.
Way back in 1875 George Brown signed a free trade deal with the Americans, the now almost entirely forgotten Fish-Brown Treaty (the US Secretary of State was Hamilton Fish). Unfortunately it failed in the US Senate. John A took this as proof that the Americans would never negotiate a reasonable deal, which he himself had tried to strike in his first term. Making a virtue out of necessity Macdonald promoted a strong protectionist tariff, which he shrewdly labelled the National Policy. For the next 110 years trade was wrapped in the flag. To question the logic of Macdonald's protectionist hot house was to question Canada's very essence. That a nation as successful as ours could be undone by a trade deal was absurd. Yet it was plausible enough to generations of Canadians, especially to Canadians who worked in protected industries.
The Left in 1988 argued that free trade wasn't about economics, but about the soul of Canada. They were right. In freeing trade with America we freed ourselves from the psychology of mediocrity, cowardice and parochialism. We said that we were now, belatedly, more than capable of taking on our older brother on his terms and beating him. So we did. By extension we are now capable of taking on the world.
Not bad for a trade deal. And yes Mr Turner, we have read the agreement.
"The full impact of the deal was also minimized by the gradual devaluation of the Canadian dollar. For much of the 1990s the dollar was below 80 cents US. "
I assume, then, that the flight of capital we see occurring now that the dollar is at par is an example of the full impact? May we assume that such a result was accounted for and still deemed acceptable? If it is acceptable to those who made the deal, what is the supposed benefit to the nation, as a whole?
Posted by: fergusrush | Wednesday, November 27, 2013 at 04:22 PM
"I assume, then, that the flight of capital we see occurring now that the dollar is at par is an example of the full impact?"
What are you talking about and what does NAFTA have to do with it?
Posted by: Cytotoxic | Thursday, November 28, 2013 at 02:18 AM