Aug. 2, 2012 – To revitalize its flagging trade and productivity performance, Canada should adapt its international trade and investment policies to a world of global value chains, evolving trade and investment patterns, and deepening economic integration; according to a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute. In “Breaking Free: A Post-mercantilist Trade and Productivity Agenda for Canada,” Research Fellow Michael Hart says to be more competitive, Canada needs to wean itself more completely from a mercantilist approach best suited to an era in which products and firms had clear national identities, which is rarely the case today.
“Canada’s trade and investment policies are stuck in the past. We risk being caught flat-footed and side-lined in the highly integrated global marketplace,” says Professor Hart, Simon Reisman Chair in Trade Policy at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University.
What’s more, Canada should not wait for a hypothetical “payoff” from negotiations with other countries, says Professor Hart, but instead proceed in its own interest to remove home-grown impediments to trade. He identifies disruptive anti-dumping and countervailing duty regimes, ineffective subsidies and procurement preferences, tariff restrictions, including in supply-managed sectors, overabundant regulations and remaining restrictions on foreign ownership, as areas where liberalization should prevail. Such reforms would generate cost savings for the government, and leave the economy more competitive and with a stronger tax base, he says.
These reforms, according to the author, would leave Canada free to focus on easing passage for secure trade and people at the vital Canada-US border and aligning its regulations with the United States and other major trading partners in areas where regulatory duplication does not make sense. Beyond the United States, Canada should focus its diplomatic resources on the basis of a clearly articulated business case or foreign policy rationale.
By these criteria, notes Professor Hart, there is more potential for a useful breakthrough for Canada across the Pacific – where there is growing demand for what Canada can provide and where government-to-government relations “remain an important part of enhancing economic ties” – than across the Atlantic or in the rest of the Americas.
Click here for the full report.
For more information contact: Professor Michael Hart, Simon Reisman Chair in Trade Policy at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University, at 613-739-0847 or Michael_Hart@Carleton.ca; Daniel Schwanen, Associate Vice President, International and Trade Policy, C.D. Howe Institute, 416-865-1904; email: cdhowe@cdhowe.org.