Excertped from Neil Reynolds in the Globe and Mail, April 13, 2011 ‘Free trade is not a ‘measly’ concept’
The EU-Canada agreement may well extend a greater right for a Canadian to take a job in Europe than NAFTA does for a Canadian to take a job in the U.S. Writing in the March issue of Policy Options, former Canadian diplomat and trade expert Colin Robertson says Canada’s objectives in the coming “perimeter border” negotiations with the States should include extensive mobility rights: “The ultimate goal should be to make the flow of traffic – people, goods and services – within the single biggest bilateral trading relationship in the world as easy as that enjoyed within the European Union.”
Mr. Robertson says “rules and regulations,” as opposed to tariffs, now constitute the biggest barriers to the free movement of people and products in North America. (Orange juice, for example, is regarded as a drug in Canada but as a food product in the U.S.) Canada and the U.S. now make 5,000 changes to trade regulations every year – costing Canadian exporters $15-billion a year; more than 1 per cent of Canada’s GDP.
The Canada-U.S. FTA eliminated tariffs. Now it is time to get rid of the rules and regulations that succeeded them – whether doing so produces GDP gains or not: Simply put, it expands human liberty. Free-trade agreements, after all, are not free-trade agreements. They are managed-trade agreements. These legalistic, bureaucratic agreements nevertheless move peoples and nations closer to free trade – once eloquently anticipated by Frédéric Passy, the classical French economist who jointly won the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901: “Some day, all [trade] barriers will fall,” he said. “Some day, mankind will form one workshop, one market, one family.”