Jack Layton: "Buy Canadian!"

Finally, nationalism comes clean.

How very, very refreshing.

But how do we re-instate Waffle a third of a century after its dismissal by the very people now calling out for its ideas?

And, more importantly perhaps, how do we cobble together the people and technology made redundant by the products of sweat shops round the world ?

Right!

The U.S. government already has many "Buy American" provisions in place - far more so than we do in Canada.

I'm curious to know if any of these buy locally projects ever make a dent. People often have difficulty figuring out where things are made a lot of the time. Ask Canadians where the bananas they have with their Kellogg's Corn Flakes for breakfast come from and most probaly don't even know where they are grown or how they get to Canada. Even though we have great weather most of the time I'm pretty sure they don't come from BC.

I suppose Harper has been lobbying the White House over this.

Obama urges Congress to soften protectionist trade message

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1248975

The main obstacle for Ottawa, however, is the popularity of Buy American among labour groups and free-trade critics who carry significant influence with Democrats.

The Buy American concept also has strong appeal for voters in economically distressed states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, which are perpetual electoral battlegrounds for Democrats.

"People need to understand their chances of talking the American public out of this kind of attitude are zero," Representative Barney Frank, Democratic chairman of the House Financial Services committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill.

The only reason we would need to embark on a "Buy Canadian" policy is if Canadian goods were otherwise uncompetitive with foreign imports. If Canadian products were cheaper or better, such a clause would be completely unnecessary.

Which then raises the question - why do we want to buy products that are either more expensive or inferior to others that are available?

Look at the situation in the U.S.: The stimulus package is intended in part to build new infrastructure - roads, bridges, tunnels, railways, etc. For this steel, iron and other materials are needed. But, by choosing to buy more expensive or inferior American made products (if they were cheaper or better this clause would be unnecessary), less steel, iron, etc. can be purchased and fewer bridges, tunnels, railways, etc. can be built or upgraded.

Everyone loses - it's obvious that foreign workers, producing a product for export, lose as they are discriminated against simply for not being Americans (or in Layton's case, Canadians).  But people at home also lose as their government spending is unable to do as much as it could.

Unionist wrote:

So that we can work, and earn money, and be able to afford to buy anything in the first place.

I imagine Chinese steelworkers have the same aspirations. But I guess it's their own fault for not being Canadian.

They should have tried harder, I suppose.

The Chinese were doing alright until British gun boats arrived and forced them to accept the opium trade. That's right, our colonial forefathers belonged to drug gangs.

Quote:

The Opium War, also called the Anglo-Chinese War, was the most humiliating defeat China ever suffered. In European history, it is perhaps the most sordid, base, and vicious event in European history, possibly, just possibly, overshadowed by the excesses of the Third Reich in the twentieth century.

   By the 1830's, the English had become the major drug-trafficking criminal organization in the world; very few drug cartels of the twentieth century can even touch the England of the early nineteenth century in sheer size of criminality. Growing opium in India, the East India Company shipped tons of opium into Canton which it traded for Chinese manufactured goods and for tea. This trade had produced, quite literally, a country filled with drug addicts, as opium parlors proliferated all throughout China in the early part of the nineteenth century. This trafficing, it should be stressed, was a criminal activity after 1836, but the British traders generously bribed Canton officials in order to keep the opium traffic flowing. The effects on Chinese society were devestating. In fact, there are few periods in Chinese history that approach the early nineteenth century in terms of pure human misery and tragedy. In an effort to stem the tragedy, the imperial government made opium illegal in 1836 and began to aggressively close down the opium dens.

The Opium Wars

It always fascinating that the richest people in the world who consume far more than their share and often the share of the liftetimes of entire villages, are always so concerned about alleviating poverty when it comes to trade. What fascinates me more is that otherwise intelligent people still buy that shit.

Unionist wrote:

A_J wrote:

Which then raises the question - why do we want to products that are either more expensive or inferior to others that are available?

So that we can work, and earn money, and be able to afford to buy anything in the first place. Of course, for those that don't need to work in order to live, "free trade" and the cheapest possible goods sounds like heaven on earth. That's why it's the humble Canadians, not the high and mighty, who opposed free trade. Strange, isn't it, that we lower classes would oppose cheap high-quality goods? Maybe we've seen through the parlour trick.

I'd like to agree with you Unionist, but I can't. I agree as far as the workers are concerned, but the workers do not run the company and cannot ensure that products are being made that we need. If we keep buying GM's gas guzzlers, they'll never make anything more efficient.

I don't think  concentrating on providing the cheapest possible labor is the way to go thats a losing propostition as can't compete with China and India so what Canada needs to focus on is having a highly educated and skilled and diverse work force and they will be beating down are doors for Canada's expertise and inovation.  They are already got the door trampled down when it comes to our resources why not the people?

I think its important to believe in what you do and if there are better products out there it wise to invest in new inovation or get out of the race unless your into that loonie store stuff but then there is only so much plastic that a household can buy without it taking over their space.  This way it is less likely you will have to worry about starving as you have a product or service that is in demand in good times as well as bad. 

Yes Canadian companies are uncompetative in this new global era.  Why? Because we believe in things like worker saftey, environmental protection, labour standards and so on.  Not enough mind, but we still do.

Food imports come into Canada and are on our shelves that are grown with known and banned carcinogens, which produces cheap food and Canadian farmers are told they are not competative.  Brazil (the great global success story in agriculture according to the global trade crowd) is estimated to have over 20,000 slaves working in just Soya alone (read Raj Patel's Stuffed and Starved). And yet again some wag trots out the Canadians just aren't competative enough routine.  Well if doing these things are what makes us competative than you can keep competative and shove it where the sun don't shine in my books.

Every time we buy some piece of crap product or food because it is cheaper than what is made or grown here we are contributing to poverty and injustice around the world.  Trade is a good and positive thing if done fairly and to try and bring people up to the highest levels and standards.  That is not what we do.  We do as unionist mentioned - we race to the bottom.  In the race to the basement it is workers, where ever they live that lose each and every time.

Thank you Jack Layton for opening up this much needed discussion about what is needed to be done to have real trade that benefits communities and people.

And Jasonj2 you might want to check your facts.  The 2007 figure is 79%, but much of that trade is in non-manufacturing procuts.  In 2006 (the last year figures are available) 10% of that was raw crude.  A further 7% was in refined oil products.  Auto made up a further 10%.  While we have a positive trade balance with the US tis true - if you remove the value of oil and gas, it gets closer to net balance.   Our trade balance with the rest of the world though is net negative suggesting quite strongly we have become over dependent on one market, ignored our own domestic markets and have lagged behind on innovation because of that. 

Also when we ramped up exports under CUSTA and then NAFTA we saw a drop in real terms of the purchasing power of the average wage.  Little of what we produce in Canada in our industrial sector flows to the United States that doesn't also return here through redundent trade- the dirty little secret of global economics.  Your knowledge of trade realities is a little sketchy I am afraid.

Unionist wrote:

I believe in international solidarity, but my definition doesn't include an international competitive race to the bottom by workers competing against each other to see who can work the hardest and starve the fastest.

No, instead Chinese workers will have to work that much harder and cheaper in order to compete with privileged Canadian producers.

Unionist wrote:

Do you agree with me that if we don't produce something or other, we will starve?

Canada's trade surplus in 2008 was $80 billion.

That's $80 billion worth of "something or others" that this country produced and exported over and above the value of the "something or others" we imported from abroad.  We're not going to starve, not by a long shot. 

Unionist wrote:

"Exported", yes. But [i]"produced"[/i]?? That's a term with variable shades of meaning. With natural resources accounting for [url=http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-010-x/00505/7894-eng.htm][color=red]60 percent of exports[/color][/url], and with the most labour-intensive manufacturing sectors suffering plant closures and job losses in the hundreds of thousands, we appear to be doing lots more "exporting" than "producing"

So, we send our precious fossil fuels and raw logs away to be processed in other countries, and they send it back to us as value-added finished products for us to buy while at the same time hemorrhaging jobs? I wonder for how long we can keep that up?

Hey BA.

Breakthrough.

Loblaws will not be importing U.S. "Black Angus" beef in a month's time.

My favourite butcher - with whom I have bantered good naturedly for two years now about Loblaws' propensity to import the high-priced suff from south of the border - informed me on the weekend. He wanted to be first to tell me. Not that I can afford the beef from the specialty counter yet.

I know, beef is something one should not eat too much of for enfironmental reasons, but my doughter (and others I know) hod to reluctantly go back to getting their iron and protein from a product on the hoof. Just not too much of it. And lots of whole grains.

A_J wrote:

Unionist wrote:

I believe in international solidarity, but my definition doesn't include an international competitive race to the bottom by workers competing against each other to see who can work the hardest and starve the fastest.

No, instead Chinese workers will have to work that much harder and cheaper in order to compete with privileged Canadian producers.

Unionist wrote:

Do you agree with me that if we don't produce something or other, we will starve?

Canada's trade surplus in 2008 was $80 billion.

That's $80 billion worth of "something or others" that this country produced and exported over and above the value of the "something or others" we imported from abroad.  We're not going to starve, not by a long shot. 

 It is amazing you would know the number for 2008 when the full data has not been released yet.  Kreskinesque really.  The trade balance for 2007 according to Industry Canada was about 43 billion.  This included items such as wheat, logs, minerals and so on.  Of the top 25 export industries 46% of all exports came from natural resource extraction.  (Oil and gas extraction of course led the way).  If anything our manufacturing base has been eroding to such a degree that the balance is likely to become more heavily dependent on raw resources in the next few years tipping the balance to more than 50%.  In fact if you take off secondary processing of raw resources (such as pulp) from the manufacture numbers you are already over the 50% threshold.

There is a simple plain fact.  You can not continue to export the wealth producing parts of your economy to other nations with a lower and lower set of standards each time the new 'economic miricle' location moves and expect to be able to sustain things like social spending.  You simply are not doing a Chinese worker a favour by supporting a system that exploits them in conditions that are right out of Dickens

And the year 2004, U, was when it started to become clear that the loonie was going to turn into a petrodollar and it was only a matter of time before Ontario's industry - with its head offices elsewhere - was going to go uncompetitive, shut down.

Wrote a piece for the local dead tree media to that effect that year.

I think A_J could be concerned that Canadians would be in tough for manufacturing our own toilet paper and furniture and plastic shower curtain liners, chainsaws, buses and alarm clocks. And who would supply the witty sentiments for those over-priced Hallmark greeting cards made from old growth Canadian logs? 

How could democratically-elected government in Ottawa possibly manage to create a national energy policy all by themselves without American CEO's dictating it to them?

 YES WE CAN!

Harper & Ignatieff have quite the winning economic policies, but just not sure who is winning here. I'm pretty sure it ain't da workers.

You're doing one heck of a job boys!

More big job losses in store for Canada as firms hunker down

http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5hoF1gyuhz0q6IQxNW72yCsdGi4xA

There is not a single hothouse grower of oranges in Canada- nor will there ever be.  Oranges grow on trees.   Large tree production is not conducive to greenhouse growing, so AJ your agrument is full of bananas

Attempt at strained humour deleted.