Canada Needs to Have a Serious Talk About Trade Policy
Trade policy has received next to no attention this election, despite the post-pandemic collapse of corporate supply chains, the unequal distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, and the climate crisis. It will be impossible to confront these problems without a progressive trade policy.
Canadian Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole (left) and prime minister Justin Trudeau (right) at an election debate in Gatineau, Quebec, Canada, on September 8, 2021. (Justin Tang / Canadian Press / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Canada’s short, largely unwanted, fourth-wave federal election campaign will come to a head on Monday, September 20. Over the past five weeks, the Justin Trudeau government’s pandemic response, job and housing precarity, and climate change vied with trust in government as top issues for voters. Opposition parties are making connections between these challenges and our rigged corporate trade regime, but it takes some digging through their platforms to find it.
This is too bad, because there are some good ideas for progressive, worker- and climate-centered trade reforms among the policy platforms of several of the parties running. These ideas, such as Green New Deal campaigns to expand the caring economy, decarbonize, and transition carbon-intensive sectors and workers to good, green jobs will go unheard. Canadians would have benefited from a trade reform debate.
Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) has been a champion of fair trade for decades. But its proposals are generally not very detailed and often rely too much on abstract rhetoric. In its 1997 platform, for example, the NDP called for trade deals “that work for people, not against them.” Drawing on demands from global labor and environmental movements, the party proposed including “real, enforceable and progressive social, labor and environmental standards” in new agreements.
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