Op-Eds
Canada is a trading nation. Trade keeps the economy working, vital to the well-being of every Canadian. Securing and maintaining the country’s trade is thus one of the topmost responsibilities of the federal government, requiring skill, determination and a strategic focus on the national interest.
That means ensuring, among other things, that Canada’s weak performance in defence and security doesn’t spill over and harm the country’s key trading relationships, particularly when it comes to dealing with the United States, our biggest economic partner. The danger is that this spillover could well happen.
Former U.S. president Donald Trump caused a stir recently with his threat to NATO allies for not spending enough…
Standing back and looking at today’s global trading picture, one can see that it’s not pretty – destabilized by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, by the unsettled multilateral situation at the World Trade Organization and by innumerable regional trade disputes.
Most important among the issues, though, is the looming clash between the West and China over electric vehicles (EVs), which is set to dominate this year’s trade agenda.
This fight is shaping up to be an epic battle, covering a wide swath of minerals critical to EV production and with implications reaching deep into national decarbonization policies and supply chains, not only for the Canadian automotive industry but for a large array of businesses…
Bill C-282 is a terrible piece of legislation. Yet it sailed through the House of Commons and is now in the Senate, the last hope for bringing some sanity to the matter.
Indications are that key senators, including Senator Peter Boehm, chair of the Senate Foreign Affairs and International Trade Committee, have serious problems with the Bill.
The Bill amends the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Act to insert a provision that prohibits the government from concluding any trade agreement that would increase foreign access to Canada’s supply managed agriculture sector.
This is an unprecedented effort that further protects the dairy, poultry and egg producers from foreign import competition. But…
As governments subsidize ever-expanding decarbonization measures, including Volkswagen’s St. Thomas, Ont., battery plant that got $13 billion from Canada, there are clouds gathering on the trade horizon.
Canada had matched what Volkswagen would have gotten under similar, American subsidies. Many of these national measures to aid the transition to net-zero emissions, even if based on the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris climate-change agreement, may run headlong against trade rules that prohibit both the subsidization of goods that enter international markets as well as local content requirements that discriminate against imports.
Governments have to find accommodation or the world could be in store for a…
China’s disruptive behaviour had de-stabilized the global trading order well before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February. Such geopolitical trends, among others, have converged to produce tectonic shifts in international business as we go forward into 2023.
So, what does this mean for what still remains of the post-Second World War rules-based trading system?
For starters, the World Trade Organization, the body that oversees the multilateral system, is under considerable stress. In spite of exhortations at its ministerial meeting last June and a recent plea from its director-general, the WTO has floundered over the past few years.
The problems are deeply entrenched. The WTO is mired in internal governance…
