[tritium]

We all know about the Free Trade and how its not doing the job creation job but losing jobs to countries that pay 3-4 hrly. I just heard that Del Monte is closing and the peach farmers have lost 15,000 an acre and lost workers who picked the fruit. One thing is happening today is the province of Ontario has given Essex Plant, near Windsor Ont., money to keep the transmission plant going and 300 families keep their jobs with no thanks to the Harper government who said no but has helped out grain farmers, pig farmers, given Quebec more money then they asked for etc.

[Public_Domain]

[tritium]

Mr_Canada Mr_Canada:

No.

Wow, what an insightful response.

Would you care to elaborate?

[tritium]

Question about your sig Mr Canada??



Canada should be 1/10 that of the United States correct. I mean, Canada's population is 1/10 that of the United States, so I would thing our crime rate should be at least 1/10 that of the United States or LESS. Correct.

Humm, you should check into Canada's crime rate before blasting the United States on it crime rate.

[grainfedprairieboy]

Free trade has been a spectacular success for Canada overall but particularily for consumers. Opponets claim jobs have been lost as factories move off shore but very few jobs (if any) have been lost that wouldn't have disappeared anyway.

[dino_bobba_renno]

NAFTA has been by and large huge a success. Some people like to pick out particular issues and point to them as reasons why NAFTA should be abolished but you could do that with any trade agreement. Canada benifited greatly from the NAFTA agreement particularly when our dollar was lower. If anyone one had room to complain back then it would have been the US.

[Toro]

Yes.

Canada is a trading nation. Lowering trade barriers increases exports to other companies and gives Canadians better jobs.

[CommanderSock]

Yes Free trade is the only way to go forward. I would even absolutely be delighted for Canada if we signed a free trade agreement with European bloc.



ps. not a freedom of movement for people trade agreement, just goods and services.

[tritium]

grainfedprairieboy grainfedprairieboy:

Free trade has been a spectacular success for Canada overall but particularily for consumers. Opponets claim jobs have been lost as factories move off shore but very few jobs (if any) have been lost that wouldn't have disappeared anyway.

Not sure I agree with you 100%.

Yea in some ways it has been a success for Canada, but in other ways, not so much.

Canada has lost many of it's high paying jobs in the manufacturing industry, replaced with many low paying service jobs.

I am not sure trading a $32/hr job for a $12/hr job where 2 people have to work to support a household is moving forward.

GFPB, you yourself have admitted both you and your wife both work.

I know, you'll shoot back saying you don't both have to work. But the fact that you are, says you do.

There is a difference between Free Trade and Fair Trade with taxes and duties on those products that do not qualify. Sorta like Canadian beef and lumber. What happen to Free Trade their?

[Rationalist]

Yes, free trade is good because it allows countries that have a comparative advantage in producing goods and services to trade with each other. However, NAFTA is not free trade, it's corporate-managed trade. It's a giant piece of legislation that has special clauses for every large corporation able to afford lobbyists. Most people that believe in free trade and free markets have been duped into voting for this piece of crap trade agreement.

For those that voted Conservative, they went back on their promise not to tax energy trusts (which sort of infuriated me because I lost a good portion of my investment portfolio when share prices fell through the floor, and I'm still waiting for them to come back up again so I can sell). The point is that, after that decision, an American group who had their investments in energy trusts have been filing a NAFTA claim against us because of their lost profits. This I don't agree with, we should not have to bend our policy to benefit foreign corporate interests (however misguided and stupid that policy was).

I would love to see actual free trade happening, based on the terms of the countries involved, but not what we have currently. If you want to have a good laugh, look at the Agriculture clauses in NAFTA. Scrap it, replace it with a true free trade agreement.

[saturn_656]

tritium tritium:

Canada has lost many of it's high paying jobs in the manufacturing industry, replaced with many low paying service jobs.

I am not sure trading a $32/hr job for a $12/hr job where 2 people have to work to support a household is moving forward.

GFPB, you yourself have admitted both you and your wife both work.

I know, you'll shoot back saying you don't both have to work. But the fact that you are, says you do.

There are not too many families in North America who can live comfortably with only one spouse working.

Both me and my SO work, now we've done the budget and she doesn't have to work, she can stay at home and pop out kids and we can make it by.

But if she does that we have to sacrifice certain things, like trips to the city, our second car, my affinity for HDTV, boat, Ski-Doo... and we don't want to do that. I guess it helps we both have jobs we enjoy.

[grainfedprairieboy]

tritium tritium:

Canada has lost many of it's high paying jobs in the manufacturing industry, replaced with many low paying service jobs.

Canada has lost those jobs because they are high paying but shouldn't have been. Why should an assembly line worker with a grade ten education make as much as a chartered accountant?

If you make teapots in Canada you just aren't going to be able to compete with teapots from China or Mexico. This gives you two choices, lobby the government for protection against foreign teapots forcing Canadians to pay considerably more for the product or move your company's manufacturing offshore where wages allow your product to be competitive.

tritium tritium:

I am not sure trading a $32/hr job for a $12/hr job where 2 people have to work to support a household is moving forward.

When compared to paying 150.00 vs 12.00 for a teapot the answer is pretty clear.

tritium tritium:

GFPB, you yourself have admitted both you and your wife both work.

I know, you'll shoot back saying you don't both have to work. But the fact that you are, says you do.

I don't remember ever saying my wife works. She is both French and a housewife and both categories are not exactly conducive with actually working.

I myself am a business owner and investor and work for myself by choice. In three years I will be 45 and I have promised to fully retire though I could at this point. From what I do, most of my employees would suggest that what I do is hardly "work".

tritium tritium:

There is a difference between Free Trade and Fair Trade with taxes and duties on those products that do not qualify. Sorta like Canadian beef and lumber. What happen to Free Trade their?

I support free trade even if it negatively impacts me.

I farm bees. Keeps me connected to the land, gives me a certain pride, drains my wallet and assures me that I won't suffer from arthritis thanks to the miracle of bee stings.

However, Argentinian honey has been flooding the Canadian and US market driving down the wholesale price for domestic producers. At the same time, Chinese honey, which is on again off again because of the diseases, pesticides and other chemicals constantly found in it has worked its way around Canadian regulatory hurdles by showing up in cereal packaged in Ontario but made in China. My point is that you cannot stop the products from entering your market so either become more efficient or die.

[Ruxpercnd]

I have taken Econ 101 and Econ 102 in college, and did a graduate level study of Egyptian economic history. So I have heard the theories of comparative advantage and lazaire faire economic theory. I have taken both sides at one time or another.

However, at this time I believe that countries should look after the direct interest of their citizens. Rather, citizens should demand fair treatment from their governments. Economic theory isn't any good if it directly takes away people's livelyhoods. The problem either way is just too much corruption. I have never heard a corporate ceo beg for free and fair competition. The ceo's job is to remove competition, often through mergers, buyouts or deceptive practices. And they want to tell us that NAFTA is free trade?

- In America, we have too much corruption. How can we expect good economic results from wide open foreign trade when domestic markets are monopolized and controlled by special interests? Our politicians take bribes from the oil industry and allow monopolistic and preditory practices in other industries. Bankers want taxpayers to cover their gambling debts.

- Nafta and other trade agreements have been crafted to benefit large corporate interests as if people do not count. We citizens do not have any opportunity to vote on these treaties. There is no debate and no citizen input. This is pay-to-play politics. I just do not believe that we have democracy at the federal level.

- It is so hypocritical to talk about free markets but not a free market for labor. Instead of paying the real market rate for labor, businesses are going illegally importing outside labor and asking taxpayers to cover the costs. Even business like MacDonald's and Walmart tell their employees to file for food stamps and state paid medical coupons. This is corruption not fair trade. It is just such bullshit to say we have a shortage of nurses and computer programmers... that we need to import labor. They should just pay market rates instead of asking for subsidies cheaper foreign labor.

In summary: there is no "Fair" in fair trade and there is no "Free" in free trade. Just payoffs, and cheating.

The answer is to strangle government by cutting taxes until the government is run by a skeleton crew and corporate ceo's actually have to work for a living. We pay taxes to fund corruption, like we pay for oil to fund terrorists.

You will never have the opportunity to vote yes or no for NAFTA. You would have to have real democracy for that to happen.

[Toro]

tritium tritium:

Canada has lost many of it's high paying jobs in the manufacturing industry, replaced with many low paying service jobs.

That's not true.



http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhil ... .html#more

What has happened is that low productivity jobs have been lost, but there is no evidence that NAFTA has had any effect on aggregate manufacturing job losses.

$1:

Employment losses of 5 percent translate into 100,000 lost jobs and strike me as large, not least because only a relatively small number of industries experienced deep tariff concessions. Indeed, most of these lost jobs were concentrated in the most-impacted, import-competing industries. For this group, with its 12 percent job losses, one in eight jobs disappeared. This number points to the very large transition costs of moving out of low-end, heavily protected industries. It reflects the most obvious of the costs associated with trade liberalization.

It is difficult to be sure whether these transition costs were short-run in nature. However, two facts drawn from the most recent seasonally adjusted data suggest that they probably were short run costs. First, the FTA had no long-run effect on the Canadian employment rate which was 62 percent both in April 1988 and April 2002. Second, Canadian manufacturing employment has been more robust than in most OECD countries. For example, between April 1988 and April 2002, manufacturing employment rose by 9.1 percent in Canada, but fell by 12.9 percent in the United States and by 9.7 percent in Japan. This suggests, albeit not conclusively, that the transition costs were short run in the sense that within 10 years the lost employment was made up for by employment gains in other parts of manufacturing.

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~trefler/fta.pdf

[sthompson]

Hey Toro, why don't you go work for the Fraser Institute? Sure they'd love a bright young apologist for corporate welfare like yourself. Their motto is "Competitive market solutions to public policy problems." Seem like your kind of people.

NAFTA isn't working. Must I mention softwood lumber, the BSE crisis and the continuing crisis in our agricultural industry? (But that only affects family farms, so I guess it doesn't count--the big, US-owned vertically integrated agribusinesses are doing just fine.)

But more importantly, NAFTA is no longer the issue. It's old news. We're now into NAFTA-plus, namely, agreements like the SPP that take economic integration even deeper and have even less democratic and parliamentary oversight. Agreements that are meant to harmonize our entire regulatory framework. Agreements that inevitably affect our policies on everything from health care to the environment to immigration, and lock us into a US economy that is currently free-falling into recession.

NAFTA-plus is being sold as more touchy-feely "cooperation", which we shouldn't argue with because "trade is good" (a gross oversimplification if ever there was one). The bottom line, though, is that it is set up to ensure that the U.S. gains pretty much exclusive access to Canadian resources (such as Alberta's oil, long identified by Cheney as key to US energy security). Actually, its not even the US itself, but multinational corporations such as Wal-Mart, the CEOs of which currently are the only people "at the table" making these plans and decisions. Even our own MPs are just taking directives from the corporate sector.

Free trade, while a nice concept, when put into practice through NAFTA and subsequent agreements simply means that the biggest corporations make more profit while regular citizens pay the price, above all in loss of control, loss of sovereignty, and loss of democracy. Loss of democratic power at the level of individual citizens can't be measured on any economic graph. But then economics isn't really about measuring the true costs to people of anything, whether it's the Exxon Valdez oil spill (which was a great economic success--just look at all the jobs it created!) or the REAL costs of "free" trade.