We journalists have been known from time to time to exaggerate or miss the point.
When we graduate into public life, though, one would hope the punditry and intellectual certainty give way to evidence-based decision-making and assertive representation.
It is worrisome, thus, to see former journalist Chrystia Freeland, now our International Trade Minister, in full-on fumble mode with the Canada-Europe Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, better known as CETA, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, better known as TPP.
For a trading country with resources and goods we would like the world to want, and for a world with resources and goods we want our trading country not to have fettered, Canada is in suddenly risky straits with two gigantic opportunities.
It is fair to note the two trade problems are not much of Canada’s doing, but they require ministerial ministering – and fast. Unfortunately, there is a certain blasé quality to Freeland’s responses that sound like whistles past the graveyard – the journalist in her has not been reshaped by the politician she is.
Until the Brexit vote, it appeared CETA was en route to a swifter-than-scheduled passage. Only EU institutions were to have ratified the Canada-Europe deal.
But the vote has utterly changed the context of the European Union and its political dynamics, and rather than risk the ire of nations by asserting its supranational nature, the EU has declared it now it will be necessary for 28 separate governments to pass the trade deal. The fast track is sidetracked.
We were already in the back seat, perhaps even the baby seat, in CETA, given Canada is roughly one-tenth the size of our partner in the pact. To hear Freeland, we have nothing to fret about the long and winding road through the capitals of the continent. Too many credible entities feel she is wrong.
True enough, it is possible to provisionally implement much of CETA next year in a three-step process, but even that could unravel country by country as individual nations express either opposition to elements of the deal or the need for amendments. The steak could be turned into ground beef before our eyes.
There are no small opponents: Germany and France. To summarize: das ist très difficile.
If businesses are serious about wanting CETA, it is likely up to them to burn up the phone lines, hop on the red-eyes, leverage their networks and get into Europe this summer to take the seven-year negotiating odyssey over the finish line. Notwithstanding her rather casual reassurance, Freeland is handicapped in any event as an advocate – political Europe knows political Canada wants the deal, so business Europe and business Canada have to exert the pressure necessary to effect CETA by demonstrating local economic impact. No one said it would be easy, and now we can say that certain no one is correct.
But as the sudden skirmish takes place over the Atlantic, our federal government has gone into blackout mode on the TPP. Rather than use the Three Amigos gathering in Ottawa in late June to put both feet in, Canada sent an ambivalent and deferential signal – as in, thanks for coming, Mr. Obama, but we will wait for your successor before passing judgment on the deal our predecessors struck.
We have to fight above our weight class in matters of trade. Lately we’ve sat in the corner and looked like we were throwing in the towel. Freeland, and for that matter our prime minister, show little resolve in asserting some leadership amid the presidential electoral season below the border.
Their attitudes – not to care about or attend to TPP, not to profess worry or press the case for CETA – hardly seem the stuff of the global player our government wishes us to be.
Kirk LaPointe is Business in Vancouver’s vice-president of audience and business development.
