"As a pollster, the first question (to government) would be: Can you win? Following that, whose ox is going to be gored here?"
Once Canada retaliates with trade sanctions, said marzolini, some industry or sector "is going to be taking one for the team."
Senior Liberal party strategists agree the issue can cut any number of ways as the dispute unfolds, while doing little or nothing to differentiate the major federal parties.
Memories in Western Canada of the Liberals' hated National Energy Program can be resurrected "in a nanosecond," said one.
Political strategists will naturally weigh the domestic political benefits and risks of the softwood dispute, said another senior government official.
"But it must be the national interest - not the federal government's political interest - that guides the government's actions when it comes to something as fundamental as respect for the rules of our trading relationship with the United States."
That doesn't mean domestic politics are not being played.
The New Democrats' demand for an emergency recall of Parliament, which would normally have been dismissed out of hand by the government, got a guarded endorsement from the Prime Ministers Office on the weekend.
The Conservatives denounced the parliamentary recall Monday, while the party's natural resources critic, John Duncan, proposed that Canadians start calling the White House directly since Prime Minister Paul Martin appears unwilling to do so.
"Once again (the Liberals) are calling the Americans names, and I've never found that to be a productive way of negotiating anything," Conservative trade critic Ted Menzies said in an interview.
It certainly strikes a chord, however.
Anti-Americanism in Canada is clearly on the rise, said pollster Donna Dasko of Environics, and the Liberals are well positioned to capitalize.
While favourable attitudes toward the U.S. have have fallen to a bare majority from the 70-plus-per cent range, belief in the Liberals as best able to handle Canadian-American relations hasn't moved.
Even at the Liberal popularity low point in May during the height of sponsorship revelations, the party still polled well on the U.S. file, said Dasko.
"Purely politically speaking, anything that raises the profile of that area will help them."
The trick will be turning popular rhetoric into a saleable solution to the softwood impasse, she said.
"It's not a bad diversion right now but I'm not sure where it's going to get them at the end of the day," offered political scientist David Docherty, dean of arts at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont.
"If you're a minister of the Crown and you're calling the Americans bullies, people on the other side of the border will be paying attention. It may cause more problems south of the border than it gathers votes north of the border."
http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=eff4e71b-6bff-4180-823b-551728c29d49
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Slamming U.S. Over Softwood Could Cut Both Ways For Liberal Government
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Free trade is essentially a policy by which a government does not discriminate against imports in favour of national products. It does not, either, regulate exports in order to favour the nation's consumers. The economic case for free trade is still based on Adam Smith's argument in the Wealth of Nations (1776) that the division of labour in a population leads to greater efficiency and greater production. Deduced from the general argument, he went on to argue that countries, too, will use their natural advantages of geography, resources, and expertise to produce efficiently. Countries will have advantages, comparatively, over other countries and so all will be able to trade advantageously. The competition involved, moreover, will increase general efficiency in production.
Two Things Free Trade Has Done
Two examples exist, are real, and have entered Canadian history; they cannot be denied. Both have been detrimental to Canadians and to Canadian democracy. First, in the 1990 campaign that elected Bob Rae as premier of an NDP government in Ontario, the electorate was promised a publicly owned automobile insurance system such as operates in British Columbia and Saskatchewan. The NDP won the election and the promise was killed because the Free Trade Agreement demanded prior notification to the USA and payment of compensation to US companies claiming a loss or a potential loss of profit as a result of the new system. The NDP, incidentally, resisted free trade, which in Canada's case very clearly intrudes upon provincial jurisdiction and powers.
Secondly, the US government has supported patent legislation in a way that gives more support to corporate wealth than is the case in Canada. In the US, pharmaceutical companies may have patents and exact enormous profits over twenty years, even from lifesaving drugs. NAFTA legislates that practice for Canada and Mexico. But even before NAFTA was signed, the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney passed legislation in the Canadian parliament, giving pharmaceutical companies (few of them Canadian) twenty year patents in order to "harmonize" Canadian practice with US practice. That has already raised the cost of pharmaceuticals to Canadians (and Canadian medicare) by 12 percent per year. By legislating in the Canadian parliament before the signing of NAFTA, the government could hide from Canadians that the extension in time for pharmaceutical patents was a US requirement.
When the Canada/US Free Trade Agreement was signed, the US president, Ronald Reagan spoke. "This agreement will provide enormous benefits for the United States. It will remove all Canadian tariffs, secure improved access to Canada's market for our manufacturing, agriculture, high technology and financial sectors, and improve our security through additional access to Canadian energy supplies. We have also gained important investment opportunities in Canada.
I congratulate Prime Minister Mulroney." [Ronald Reagan, quoted in Mel Hurtig, The Betrayal of Canada, Toronto, Stoddart, 1991, p.13]
A considerably franker and tougher tone was taken by George Ball under secretary of the US treasury in 1968. It is worthwhile to look back nearly 25 years. George Ball had much to do with Canada in the 1960s. He was impatient with evidences of Canadian independence. In The Discipline of Power, [Boston, Atlantic-Little Brown, 1968, p. 113] he declares the meaning, for him, of free trade.
"Canada, I have long believed, is fighting a rearguard action against the inevitable. Living next to our nation, with a population ten times as large as theirs and a gross national product fourteen times as great, the Canadians recognize their need for United States capital; but at the same time they are determined to maintain their economic and political independence. The position is understandable, and the desire to maintain their national integrity is a worthy objective. But the Canadians pay heavily for it and, over the years, I do not believe they will succeed in reconciling the intrinsic contradiction of their position....
Sooner or later, commercial imperatives will bring about free movement of all goods back and forth across our long border; and when that occurs, or even before it does, it will become unmistakably clear that countries with economies so inextricably intertwined must also have free movement of the other vital factors of production - capital, services and labour. The result will inevitably be substantial economic integration, which will require for its full realization a progressively expanding area of common political decision."
A Short List Of Free Trade Rules
A short list of the new realities in Canada's economy and social community arising from free trade reflects the purpose of the agreements. As with examples of their effect that I have given - the killed promise of provincial auto insurance for Ontario and the 20 year pharmaceutical patent law passed by the Canadian parliament - I shall attempt to list matters about which there is no question. G. Bruce Doern and Brian W. Tomlin state in their 1991 evaluation of the Canada/US free trade negotiations, Faith and Fear [Toronto, Stoddart, 1991] the chief US goal. It related "directly to Canadian energy and investment policies. The US was determined to use the negotiations to ensure that they would never again be a target of discriminatory actions like those embodied in the N E P and FIRA. In the final agreement, the US achieved its goal." (p. 284)
At the heart of that achievement is the new reality that henceforth US investors and corporations operating in Canada shall be treated as if they are Canadian. They must be given "national treatment". No government may favour Canadian enterprise for any reason.
The US has access to all forms of Canadian energy. If there is a shortage of oil or if - for any other reason - Canada wants to cut back on its export amount to the US, it can't. It must deliver the amount it has been delivering to the US averaged over the last three years, or the same proportion of restricted output.
The US has the right to "any good" which means energy resources or anything else - at the same price as Canadians get it. If Canada (as it has done in the past) wishes to supply any form of energy to Canadian enterprise more cheaply than it sells to the US - in order to help develop Canadian industrial capacity - it may not do so. If it wishes (as it has done in the past) to place an export tax on an energy "good" to create revenue for government, it may not do so.
The US has been given a complete waiver from the operation of the laws that limit or restrict foreign ownership of Canadian controlled financial institutions. US interests may take over every federally licensed financial institution in Canada. The US has been called "Canadian" in relation to the Bank Act, the Loan Companies Act, the Trust Companies Act, and the Insurance Companies Act. The US may take over Canada's major banks; Canada may not take over US banks.
The US is given "national treatment" in a huge number of service industries. That means US enterprises must be treated as Canadian. Among them a very few are health and social services, management of hospitals, extended-care hospitals, psychiatric institutions, children's hospitals, public health clinics, medical laboratories, etc. In the list also are printing and publishing, postal and courier services, almost all building trades, drug industries, and education services. Looked at closely, the very small part of the list I have reproduced reflects on the hard push in Canada - especially by corporate interests - to break the Canadian medicare system and provide private health services. It reflects, as well, on the legislation to grant 20 year patents in drugs. It reflects upon the increasing attack in Canada upon public education, an attack which may well eventuate in some provinces establishing large, parallel, private, for-profit education services.
On all contracts over $25,000 the Canadian government will treat the US companies as Canadian for the procurement of goods by government.
The right to profit or to compete for profit is raised to a holy right. When either government "reasonably" considers that any measure (whether covered in the trade agreement or not) taken by the other country might directly or indirectly reduce benefits, the measure may be challenged before a disputes panel. Such statements throw a huge blanket over almost any freely chosen action a Canadian government might take to lessen the cost or increase the efficiency of, or extend the range of any government or nonprofit activity that offends US free enterprise interests.
Just such a blanket statement is made about culture in Canada. The Canada/US agreement specifically exempts culture from its provisions. But the very next statement, in effect, says that if Canadians make any moves in their culture that may be deemed to reduce profits by US interests, the US may retaliate in any way it thinks best.
In addition, Canada must grant unexamined "temporary" entry to an enormous range of people - among whom are scientists, teachers, researchers, medical experts, journalist, librarians, etc. - as well as most corporate personnel in transfer, or other.
Canada must grant unexamined takeover of Canadian enterprises worth between 5 million and 150 million, and it must grant unexamined takeover by indirect acquisition of enterprises worth up to a half billion dollars.
Finally, subsidies are forbidden generally, but subsidy has not yet been defined, and, as we saw, Jean Chretien broke an election promise recently so that the word doesn't have to be defined.
As an election promise to the country and to members of his own party unhappy with the Free Trade Agreement with the USA, Chretien declared he would only sign the North American Free Trade Agreement with conditions. He would sign only if the countries agreed - within two years - on definitions of subsidy (assistance to forms of national enterprise) and of dumping (usually the sale of goods to a foreign country for a price lower than that paid in the home country). Both words, undefined, plague Canada/US Trade; Canadians often believing they are bullied by US definitions. When the two-year date arrived, the Canadian government quietly annouced no agreement was reached, none was expected soon, and gave no indication that Prime Minister Chretien was in the slightest degree unhappy that the US had ignored his conditions. This means US interests can persistently attack parts of the economy unlike parts in the US, claiming Canada is using a form of "subsidy" to get advantages.
The listing of those very few points from the enormous free trade agreements reveals dramatic new realities. The two economic, social, and political systems are not now closely united - that is a false way of recording what has happened. In fact, Canada's economic, social, and political system has been set up to be increasingly absorbed into the US system.
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Perception is two thirds of what we perceive reality to be.
Difficult decisions are a privilege of rank.
<br />
— The Divine Symphony, by Inayat Khan<br />
Look up the law down there in the Great Corparate America and look up foreign investment and foreign ouwnership?
NEXT!
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Perception is two thirds of what we perceive reality to be.
Difficult decisions are a privilege of rank.
<br />
— The Divine Symphony, by Inayat Khan<br />