The Trans Pacific Partnership and Vulnerability

By Eric Rempel

In the waning days of the election campaign the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) gained a lot of attention. The Conservatives began trumpeting the signing of this partnership agreement as a major accomplishment, benefiting to all Canadians, the NDP made it clear that it did not support the agreement, and the Liberals came out somewhere in between. The Green Party opposed the agreement, primarily because it is not a free trade agreement, but something else.

My understanding of where we are at with this agreement is that it is not yet signed, so with a new liberal government coming into office, almost anything could happen. We do well to think again about what we as Canadians should be looking for in an agreement.

It seems to me that the primary purpose of a trade agreement should be to encourage trade except where such trade is not in the national interest. In principle trade is good. We produce canola in Canada. We can't grow bananas here. Bananas are produced in Guatemala. They can't grow canola there. We do well to trade canola oil for bananas.

However, such obvious benefits of free trade are offset by concerns about vulnerability. On the one hand, free trade means that if our wheat crop fails, and the wheat crop in Saskatchewan is good, we don't suffer because wheat and wheat products easily flow in to fill any void left by our local failure. But how far do we take that? We all know that if the trucks bringing food into our major food stores were to stop running [because of, say, an ice storm], it would not be more than one or two days before we would run into food shortages here in Steinbach. It's a fair question to ask: “How resilient is our food system here in Steinbach? Do we have the balance between efficiency and vulnerability right?”

On a national scale we need to ask that same question, particularly as we contemplate a trade agreement. Trade is utterly dependent on reliable transportation and a sound financial system. What confidence do we have that our transportation system and our financial system will continue to serve us as these two systems have served us in the past? A jump in oil prices would devastate our transportation system, and 2008 showed us how close we could come to a collapse of our monetary system.

So what ought a trade agreement to protect? Investments and jobs? Perhaps. No doubt stability is good for both investment and jobs, and a rigorous trade agreement does much to maintain stability.

But I am more concerned about life's necessities. I think, for example, that we need a viable Canadian dairy sector to ensure that we will always have access to a reliable supply of milk. What about fruits and vegetables? Are we comfortable with our current dependence on these necessities grown thousands of miles from here? And that's just the beginning of the list.

This is a discussion, a debate, we need to have.