Canada-U.S. free trade: The Great Debate never ended

[Oscar]

Canada-U.S. free trade: The Great Debate never ended

[ https://rabble.ca/politics/canadian-pol ... ver-ended/ ]

by Maude Barlow - Council of Canadians - October 5, 2012

QUOTE: "Canada remembers a milestone this week — the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement."


EXCERPT: "Canada remembers a milestone this week — the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. Former Mulroney government officials and the business community that supported the first-of-its-kind project are running predictable victory laps in commentaries this week, as if there were no potholes in the road Canada has taken since 1988. As if, as Margaret Thatcher once suggested, there is no alternative to free trade. Well I’m sorry to crash this little party but there is something seriously wrong with this picture.

When I say potholes I’m referring to those awkward facts about free trade, like that Canada lost 334,000 manufacturing jobs in the first five years after the Canada-U.S. deal was signed — a decline that continued under NAFTA and continues to this day. Good paying full-time jobs are more often than not replaced by precarious part-time work, which contributes to Canada’s stagnating middle-income wages over the past 20 years. It’s a harsh reality of the free trade era that most of the new wealth created — and free trade does create wealth — went straight to the top, to the richest 1 per cent in Canada and globally.

It’s a reality our government may refuse to accept but which is driving a new global movement of occupiers, indignados, workers, students, and others against corporate-led globalization. The Great Free Trade Debate of the late 1980s didn’t end in victory for Mulroney and his big business backers. The debate never stopped raging. . . . ."

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