“The Canadian colonies, as they were then in 1854, entered a free trade agreement with the United States. It ran for 12 years, and the Americans thought that the Canadian colonies were so integrated into the United States economically that they would ask or beg for entry into the U.S. Union… So instead of us joining the United States, it was a push for Canada to become an independent country. And that’s the same situation we’re facing today.”
– David Orchard, from a 2018 interview (re-aired this week.)
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a
This month, the people of Canada face an important choice. Who will be the Prime Minister to face U.S. President Donald Trump? Who will be able to negotiate with him? Who will be able to stand up to him? Who will be able to hold this country together in the wake of deliberate economic warfare that turns the tide mightily against the main nation-on-nation instrument of our wealth generation over the last few decades?
While still only a president-elect, Trump announced a plan to impose tariffs on Canadian goods on the first day of his return to the U.S. Presidency.
“This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!” he wrote on the social media platform Truth Social.[1]
Later on, Trump talked about Canada becoming the 51st state!
“You get rid of that artificially drawn line, and you take a look at what that looks like, and it would also be much better for national security. Don’t forget, we basically protect Canada.”[2]
For over a year before Justin Trudeau finally retired as Prime Minister of Canada and Canadians had other things on their minds, the Liberal Party of Canada consistently polled well below the opposition Conservative Party of Canada. But Mr. Trump’s sudden arrival and sudden aggressive actions toward his country’s next door neighbour seems to have suddenly elevated the Liberals.[3]
Now headed by the former central banker Mark Carney, it suddenly saw an enormous boost of popularity with the voters. The Mark Carney Liberals are presently besting the Pierre Poilievre Conservatives by several percentage points, thereby possibly leading the party to a fourth term in power.[4]
With less than three weeks to go before Canadians head for the ballot box, the Global Research News Hour attempts to assess the candidates from the vantage point of one of their many communities – in this case, the riding of the downtown of Winnipeg: Winnipeg Centre. The candidates will be addressing the issues particularly related to the sovereignty of Canada.
The bulk of the show features conversations with three candidates: Gary Gervais (Green Party), Leah Gazan (New Democratic Party) and Donald Grant (Peoples Party). The remainder is a replay of a February 2018 interview with farmer, political activist and a previous candidate for leadership of the former Progressive Conservative Party, David Orchard about the threats posed by the free trade agreements signed in the 80s and 90s and how the decision by President Trump to revoke NAFTA represents an opportunity for Canada as it did in the late 1800s.
Gary Gervais is the Green Party Candidate for the riding on Winnipeg Centre.
Leah Gazan is the New Democratic Party (NDP) candidate and incumbent for the riding of Winnipeg Centre.
Donald Grant is the Peoples Party candidate for the riding of Winnipeg Centre.
David Orchard is a Borden, Saskatchewan-based organic farmer, political activist and two-time contender for leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. He is also author of the 1993 best-seller The Fight for Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism (Stoddart, 1993; 2nd ed. Robert Davies, 1999). His website is davidorchard.com
(Global Research News Hour episode 469)
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Transcript of David Orchard, February 2018
David Orchard: The Canadian colonies, as they were then in 1854, entered a free trade agreement with the United States. It ran for 12 years, and the Americans thought that the Canadian colonies were so integrated into the United States economically that they would ask or beg for entry into the U.S. Union. And so they cancelled it, hoping to force Canada to join the U.S. And it backfired, because the Canadian leaders, like Thomas Darcy McGee and John A. MacDonald and George-Étienne Cartie and the others, sat down together and decided to confederate, to join forces, to join the colonies together in a confederation of Canada and build an independent Canadian economy, including building the longest railway in the world.
And they went ahead and did that. And so instead of us joining the United States, it was a push for Canada to become an independent country. And that’s the same situation we’re facing today.
We’re facing the buy-up of our industries. Our whole economy is becoming American-owned. Even our national railways are U.S.-owned. Stelco, Hudson’s Bay Company, Wendy’s, Tim Hortons, all of those companies are bought by the United States, and they’re wanting right now to buy up many more.
And yet we’ve got the Canadian government begging the Americans to extend NAFTA, saying we have to have it, and if we didn’t have it, it would be a disaster. It wouldn’t be a disaster at all. If Canada got out of the NAFTA, we would go back to trading with the Americans under the World Trade Organization.
It’s called the WTO. Over 100 countries around the world belong to it, and Canada and the United States are both members. And those are the rules that would govern our trade with the United States without NAFTA.
And we did better trading under the WTO for decades before we joined the free trade agreement in 1988, and then NAFTA in 1999. The Americans weren’t able to put tough tariffs against our lumber exports. They weren’t able to destroy the Canadian Wheat Board.
They weren’t able to buy up our country in the way that they’re doing. So if we got out, we would simply go back to trading with the United States in the multilateral WTO form, and we could do much better, and we could build our economy as an independent Canadian economy. So it wouldn’t be the end of the world at all.
Global Research: Now, as a point of full disclosure, when you ran for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party in 2003, I was one of your delegates, and I remember you arguing not so much that you wanted to scrap NAFTA as you thought it should be renegotiated, and that’s what we’re seeing right now. And I note that what was recently announced by Prime Minister Trudeau is that we could walk away from the deal, this idea that Prime Minister Harper had, better a bad deal than no deal at all. Actually, he’s been clear, no, I’m not going to accept a bad deal.
Better to walk away, essentially. So that must come as music to your ears.
DO: Well, if it’s sincere, yes, it does.
Actually, just to go back a bit, when I was running for the leadership, I was calling for a review of the FTA and NAFTA, and whether that would have led to a renegotiation or whether it would have led to us getting out of it, I don’t know. But this renegotiation is definitely not something that I was advocating. I would like to see us simply get out of it.
And if Mr. Trudeau said that he’s prepared to walk away, well, that’s good, except that at the table it seems that they’re prepared to concede more and more. And Canada has spent millions of dollars trying to convince the Americans not to pull out of NAFTA. They’ve been begging and they’ve hired all kinds of individuals, including Brian Mulroney, to be ambassadors to try to convince the Americans to hang on to the free trade agreement, to hang on to NAFTA.
And so it puts us in a bad position, a weak negotiating position. If you’ve made it so clear that you’re desperate to hang on to it, then the Americans will say, okay, what are you prepared to do to hang on to it? So what Canada has to have is the backbone to step out of it, because the things that the Americans are asking for – I mentioned they’ve bought up so many of Canada’s industries and companies. Over 10,000 Canadian companies have been bought up by American owners since these free trade deals went into place.
But there were some exemptions before. The Americans couldn’t buy up our health care and our education system and all of our airlines and telecommunications. But the Americans now, in their bargaining, are demanding the right to buy up all sectors – and that’s a quote from their demand – all sectors of the NAFTA country.
So whatever they haven’t gotten around to buying up till now, they now want the right to do that. And that would mean the end of our independence as a country. And our government has been saying, well, we want to have a more progressive NAFTA.
We want to have labor rights and gender rights and all this. They can’t have a more progressive NAFTA, because it’s all about allowing the U.S. corporations to come in and buy up our country. And that’s what we’re seeing happen.
And so we can’t have a progressive buyout of your country. We need to stand on our own two feet and build Canadian industries. We once built – I mentioned we built the railway.
We’ve also built the Avro Arrow, which was the most advanced jet interceptor in the world. We built the world’s first jet aircraft, the Avro Jetliner. And then we ended up destroying both of those industries.
And now we pay hundreds of billions of dollars to buy American aircraft and American weaponry and American ships. And, of course, we build American cars. All of the things that we could do if we built our own industries ourselves and kept those funds and those jobs and the head office jobs in the country, we could imagine the kind of economy that Canada could have if we built our own and insisted on that.
GR: David, you’d mentioned that you’re not in favour of the kind of negotiations we’re seeing right now, but you would have been open to the idea of a renegotiation. If you have the ability to call the shots here, are there two or three non-negotiable conditions that would have to be met for you to be able to, however reluctantly, accept a renegotiated NAFTA?
DO: Well, I don’t think we should be renegotiating NAFTA at all because the whole idea of NAFTA and the free trade agreement is Canada is one-on-one with the most powerful nation in the world. And that’s where we get swamped.
I don’t think we should be doing these direct one-on-one deals with the United States. Well, Mexico is involved too, but the United States is our main traditional competitor. And so we should be staying in the multilateral forum, and that’s the WTO forum, which has, as I mentioned, dozens of countries around the world.
And Canada has allies in a forum like that. We’re not one-on-one up against the United States. We have allies that could help us and have helped us over the years, and the dispute settlement mechanism, of course, is much better under the free trade agreement and NAFTA.
The Americans can challenge us in court. They can sue us for any law or regulation that they think hurts their interests. And as contrary to the spirit of NAFTA, they can sue us, and they’ve already sued us some 40 times since NAFTA has been in place, and we’ve paid out $300 million in damages to the Americans.
It’s created a chill. All the legislation that’s being passed in Canada now is all vetted to make sure that it’s in line with the NAFTA agreement. And this has placed a tremendous chill on our sovereignty as a nation.
So I’m saying that we should stay out of the one-on-one agreements, like the free trade agreement and NAFTA, with the U.S., and stay with the multilateral worldwide trade body, which has been much better for Canada.
GR: David Orchard, I’d like to play a clip. This is from the recent town hall on January 31st here in Winnipeg.
Justin Trudeau, our prime minister, was answering a question about prioritizing an east-west power grid. So here’s a little bit about what he had to say in response to that question.
JUSTIN TRUDEAU: Thank you very much for your question.
It’s something that we’ve talked about an awful lot with the provinces. Obviously the provinces have a significant role to play in this, and B.C. and Alberta are actually looking at better power line transmission between the two of them, and I think that’s a positive step. When you have, as we always do, limited funds in any government to spend on different projects, you have to look at the ones that are going to have the best impact and the biggest case.
And the case for the east-west energy grid, as opposed to other projects, hasn’t been made strongly enough to make it top of the priority list, but I can certainly say there’s been lots of conversations about it, and I’m always looking for opportunities to continue to improve how we’re efficient on an energy basis and how we’re helping each other out as best we can. GR: Maybe you’d like to respond to some of what the prime minister said, and also where you see NAFTA either enabling or impeding such a project.
DO: Well, the idea of an east-west energy grid is something that I’ve been advocating for 25 or 30 years, and before me, John Diefenbaker wanted to create an east-west energy grid.
The reason for that is simple. We’ve got our provinces now linked much more closely to the U.S. than they are to each other. When Ontario had the blackout of its electricity blackout a number of years ago, we had all of the lines from Quebec going straight south to New York, and Ontario ended up buying their energy, buying their emergency electricity from U.S. coal-fired plants rather than simply having a line across to Quebec, which has a surplus of energy.
Same thing with Manitoba. They’re more tightly linked down to Minnesota and south to the United States than they are to their neighboring provinces. Saskatchewan here is talking about building nuclear reactors because we want to phase out our coal-fired plants.
We don’t even have a line that links us over to Manitoba. We should simply link over to Manitoba and buy some of their surplus and forget about building nuclear reactors in Saskatchewan. The same for British Columbia.
They’ve got a surplus of energy, and they could supply some of the western provinces here. We should have an east-west grid that goes all the way across the country so that Canadians are looked after and have secure energy supply. We don’t have that.
If the Trudeau government is talking about it, that’s good, but we need to take this beyond the talking stage and actually build it. It’s similar to our oil situation. We’ve got Alberta oil moving south to the United States in a major way at cut-rate fire sale prices, and we’ve got eastern Canada, Atlantic Canada, importing oil from the United States and from Saudi Arabia and paying through their nose for it.
We don’t have a secure east-west link for oil and gas either, which is what we should have, but electricity is certainly the place we could start.
GR: We were just talking about energy, and I know that NAFTA does have implications not only for our energy security but also for our ability to take some proactive actions in reducing our contribution to climate change. Could you comment on that?
DO: Yes.
We’ve signed in the free trade agreement first and then repeated it in NAFTA that we’ll continue to sell to the Americans the same proportion of any energy good that they were taking, even if there’s a shortage. So that means right now, for example, the Americans are taking about 60% of our oil exports, and that means even if we face a shortage in this country, we would still be bound under the terms of the FTA and NAFTA to continue sending 60% south to the United States, even if we go short ourselves, and further that we will never charge the Americans more for any energy good than we charge Canadians. By signing that, we really cut our throats in terms of building a competitive economy because cheap energy was something that… Abundant energy is something that we have in this country, and we should be using that to build industries here that can compete with the Americans.
Instead, we’ve signed away the right to give the Americans our oil and our gas and our all forms of energy at the same price as Canadians. I’m not aware of any country anywhere in the world that’s signed away its resources in this way. And the Americans bragged, and so did some of the Progressive Conservative cabinet ministers that were involved in negotiating the free trade agreement, bragged that they put this clause in there so that we could never have another National Energy Policy, which is a policy that the Pierre Trudeau government introduced to Canadianize the oil and gas industry and was very popular with Canadians because most Canadians want to see our oil and gas, the benefits stay here in Canada.
But by putting that clause in there, it would bind the hands of any future government in terms of being able to charge higher prices for exports. We should be selling our energy resources cheaper to Canadians and charging a top dollar for everything that we export. That’s what Saudi Arabia and all the other exporters do.
They give their own customers a break, and they charge more on the world market. That’s what Canada should do. But as you point out, the implications would mean, of course, us getting out of the straitjacket of the NAFTA and the FTA terms.
GR: Okay, David Orchard, you’ve made it clear that you don’t want to renegotiate it in NAFTA. You want to see NAFTA gone, and then we can return to this international system of arbitrating trade disputes. And of course, as a farmer, you are not anti-trade or even anti-free trade.
DO: Yes, well, you make the point there that these were not free trade agreements at all with the United States. As I mentioned, the idea of giving American corporations… Canadian corporations weren’t given the right to sue the Canadian government. Only American corporations have that right.
And the idea of selling our oil and gas and all of our energy to the United States at these cheap prices, well, that’s got nothing to do with free trade. They call it free trade, but it’s not free trade. And it’s really, as I mentioned, a straitjacket to tie our hands in terms of becoming a competitor with the United States.
And what we need… we should take this opportunity to get out, get out of the NAFTA and the FTA and happily do so, and then build industries in Canada. Think of what we could do if we built… we should build our own ships. We built… in British Columbia, they built the Fast Cat Ferry, which is a beautiful machine, a quiet machine that was built, designed in British Columbia using BC aluminum.
And then it got scrapped and sold for scrap, as did the Avro Arrow that I mentioned. It got cut up and sold for scrap. But it certainly proved that we can build industries and build companies that could compete with any in the world.
We once had Massey Harris, Massey Ferguson, the largest manufacturer of farm machinery in the world. We had the McLaughlin car that was a world-class automobile. This is what we should do, is build these industries.
Norway, for example, is a small country with far fewer resources than Canada, but they have not given away their oil and gas. They’ve got two publicly owned oil companies. Statoil is one of them.
And they’ve kept the returns from their oil and gas. They’ve sold it on the world market at a good price, and they’ve invested that money, and they have over $1 trillion in their savings account now and some of the richest social programs in the world, including free health care and dental care and a whole number of other things. In Canada, if you look at what we’re facing, instead of a trillion-dollar surplus, we’ve got over a trillion dollars of debt in the federal and provincial levels and miserly old-age pensions and no drug plan across the country, all these things that we could have if we simply kept the royalties and charged a decent price for our oil and gas and built these companies.
What about the idea of having a Canadian-owned automobile? Look at Japan, how they built their auto industry, the world player, and South Korea, Sweden, other countries. Canada’s got all the resources here. We’ve got the know-how.
We don’t have to beg the Americans to renegotiate NAFTA and to stay in that agreement. We can build these industries and build a Canadian economy that all Canadians can be proud of and which will provide security for Canadians. Right now, I mean, we saw what happened when Sears, which of course was owned by the United States, when they decided just to shut it down and throw the workers out.
We’ve seen this happen with Stelco, when Americans came in and bought up our steel industry and then closed it down. There’s no security for Canadians in that. We’re essentially a colony under these free trade agreements, and we need to build our own industries so that we have security and pride for Canadians in their own country and in their own opportunities.
GR: So you think we should just message the Prime Minister or message the media?
DO: Yes. We’re encouraging everyone to write to the leaders of all the political parties because we have no political party that’s truly standing for an independent Canada and standing for putting our interests first in terms of building our economy. They’re going along with this, let’s please keep NAFTA, and so each one of those political leaders should get a letter, a swamp of letters actually, and if people would write to them and tell them what they think about what they’re doing in terms of NAFTA and tell them to get out, stand on their own two feet, build our economy in this country, and charge a half-decent price for our exports instead of giving them away.
We’re selling our oil and gas for less than world price to the Americans, and at the same time, we’ve got our schools that are short of funding, we’ve got cutbacks, we’ve got the programs that we should have in this country. We could have all of those if we would simply get out of these straitjackets of these agreements and build our own industries. But a letter to each one of the party leaders, all of the political party leaders, to ask them to stand up and fight for Canada.
The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg.
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