The Myth of Free Trade

This film is making the rounds. I found an invitation to it in my mailbox. I am no fan of free trade, but I was truly shocked by some of the statistics and claims.-CG

From the Hoodwinked website:

All statistics are subject to interpretation, but our dependence on trade with the United States is regularly and deliberately exaggerated. Even an op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail by TVOntario's Dan Dunsky repeated the often-cited false assumption that "trade with the U.S. constitutes 52% of our GDP."

Here's a brief "reality check."

How dependent is Canada on exports to the United States?

Over 80 per cent of the Canadian economy is generated by internal, domestic transactions - Canadians producing, buying and selling among themselves.

Exports to the U.S. represent less than 17 per cent of Canada's economy and over 50 per cent of that is in oil, gas and raw materials.

After hundreds of years of trying to develop value-added industries in this country and get away from the "hewers of wood, drawers of water" dependence on extracting natural resources, NAFTA, through the proportional sharing clause, has encouraged a structural change in our economy, back to the old resource-dependent model.

"In 2005, for the first time in a generation, more than half of our total merchandise exports from Canada once again consisted of raw materials and natural resources." - Jim Stanford, Ph.D. economist.

Hoodwinked: the Myth of Free Trade

A film by Bill Dunn and Linda West

Guest speaker: David Orchard