In Response

Over the weekend a question came to me about what I thought of the PM going to the Middle East to make investment deals. It’s a good question; just not sure I have the best of answers. My initial response was if we want to sell our physical resources throughout the world, why not our fiscal resources?

Since then I have been catching up on my newspaper reading (while I read my various on-line feeds on a daily basis, actually sitting at the island in the kitchen and reading real newspapers can get somewhat behind). There are many different opinions out there, even in the Globe & Mail (if you are an anti-conservative that probably surprises you!!). While there is general agreement that the PM is a frequent flyer, there is less convergence on whether all this jet-setting is actually accomplishing much. Most economists and related business finance analysts seem to think that if all the hand-shaking (for that is mostly what it is at the moment, anyway) leads to actual real activities, over the next five to ten years we might gain as much as a fifteen percent [15%] gain in trade.

Now such achievements are not to be sneezed at. Even a five percent [5%] improvement would be worth celebrating. The underlying point though is simply that our trade with the USA is so monumental that unless we manage to improve our trade with other partners (i.e. the EU, India, Mexico, South America, Australia/New Zealand & the Far East) by about fifty percent [50%] we are still going to need a big chunk of our business happening south of the border.

The other problem is that after a moment of sanity, we have fallen back into inter-provincial warfare again. Until we can get the political courage to knock down all barriers and treat every province as a co-partner, I’m not sure significant progress will be made on any other front. When we protect auto manufacturing but not canola production, when we increase our federal civil service but don’t support potash & similar mining production, when we want pipelines for LNG gas but not crude oil, when we seemingly need equalization payments but not more investment in trades & technical training, I fear we will remain stuck.

So for me the fundamental question remains: how do we as Canadians seriously focus on working with each other? Answer that, and then we can hope all this flying and elbows up and new worlds hand-shaking will deliver for our grandkids some likelihood of hope.

In reflection,
g.w.