NAFTA vendetta a sign of electoral pandering

[ConcernedCanuk]

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NAFTA vendetta a sign of electoral pandering

Don Martin, National Post
Published: Wednesday, February 27, 2008

OTTAWA -- Ontario and Ohio share more than first and last letters.

Both are fast-tracked to lose a quarter of their peak manufacturing workforce and the prospects for a job-generating rebound are grim beyond pocketing a McWal-Mart paycheque.

/snip/

But sooner or later they've got to acknowledge Canada had no role in rendering Cleveland the ground zero of the U.S. subprime mortgage housing implosion. One in 10 buildings sit empty in the state capital, which has handed the tax-depleted city a $100-million demolition bill for almost 15,000 abandoned houses stripped by thieves of all salvageable material.

To suggest the mayhem is anything but a domestic auto-manufacturing meltdown is irrational, particularly given Ohio had gained 10,000 jobs in the first two years of the free trade deal.

Blame Canada for cold weather, acid rain, B.C. bud and Celine Dion, but we don't deserve the rap for draining U.S. autoworker jobs northward. With our at-par currency and sub-par productivity, any allegation we're stealing U.S. manufacturing jobs is economically preposterous.

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Article gets pretty nasty, the above is the tame stuff.

I'm not sure if I like the way the National Post wrote this,

But one thing is clear.

Many up here are getting concerned over this NAFTA thing.

Probably have to wait to see if this remains a top issue come November.

[Caradoc]

1. NAFTA

While I wouldn't normally recommend reading the National comPost to anyone, I agree with the sentiment that the current discussion smacks of pandering with no real intention by either candidate to make any substantive changes. The issue remains that, in Canada at least, the deal was originally sold not just as an economic boon domestically but also as a way to boost Mexico socially ie. better jobs, more secure trading markets and an overall improvement for the average worker in each participating nation.
To say that this hasn't transpired is a whopper of an understatement.
Much like in the US, free trade devastated manufacturing in smaller communities (my particular Ontario village had three factories pre-NAFTA, now it's down to one and it's future here is at best tenuous). Large urban centers may have benefitted somewhat, but the result has been mass migration by youth to the cities to find better paying jobs.
Furthermore, in social terms Mexico has gone from bad to almost obscene.
In the end, nations didn't write NAFTA, large multinational corporations did, and there never was any intention to actually improve their host societies, a debt that's long overdue. They were simply looking for a way to increase market share while also being more 'competitive' by moving manufacturing to jurisdictions where they could get away with paying much, much less.
The only solution is 'pegging', where any movement of jobs out of a nation requires a penalty either in short-term tarrifs or a 'social' tax.