Spr.Earl said:
99.99% of U All's don't realise that we supply just over 30% of all their energy.
See how significant we would become then if we closed all the valves on the oil and gas going south or put export duties on the oil and gas as they are getting it cheaper than the current market price.
To bad most Canadians don't realise 85% of our economy is directly tied to those same U alls.
PUBLICATION: The Ottawa Citizen
DATE: 2005.03.17
EDITION: Final
SECTION: News
PNAME: Editorial
PAGE: A16
COLUMN: David Ljunggren
BYLINE: David Ljunggren
SOURCE: Citizen Special
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Canada would be less smug without the U.S. market
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
United States good -- must be obeyed. United States bad -- must be defied. It's depressing what often passes for informed debate in Canada when the superpower to our south comes up for discussion.
Look to the left and you'll see supercilious academics, legislators and the like more than happy to poke a stick in Uncle Sam's eye. Look to the right and there are the quaking industrialists, always ready to predict economic apocalypse unless Canada follows Washington's commands. Lost in this mindless mire is a clear idea of what's happening in the United States and the dramatic impact it could have here.
But hey, it's so much easier to wheel out the slurs, as former Liberal foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy did in a remarkably insulting open letter to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice earlier this month. Axworthy, lambasting Washington for its missile-defence system, mocked President Bush as a "divinely guided master" fond of "control-freak antics" and boasted about how many consecutive balanced budgets Canada had brought down.
He somehow forgot to mention this surplus of riches is directly linked to the U.S., which buys 85 per cent of our exports and therefore accounts for a third of the Canadian economy. If it weren't for American consumers, the Canadian government wouldn't have any money to devote to the causes so dear to Axworthy's heart. Those expensive millennium scholarships? That massive increase in health spending? You should be thanking our single best customer. This, however, is an inconvenient truth amidst the anti-American rhetoric.
The Canadian Chamber of Commerce showed a similar lack of insight when it issued its usual panic-stricken cries after Canada walked away from <missile> <defence>. The chamber, which warned darkly of "negative economic consequences," is the very same body which so wrongly forecast calamitous U.S. retribution when Canada stayed out of the Iraq war. These people should get out into the real world a bit more.
The United States has much bigger fish to fry than worrying too much about its insecure and occasionally splenetic neighbour. One target for Washington's ire is Iran, which has lots of deadly Chinese-built Silkworm anti-ship missiles. You don't need too much imagination to work out what would happen to oil prices if a tanker or two blew up in the Gulf and the immediate impact on the world's largest oil-consuming economy. Canada is currently the biggest supplier of energy to the United States, so the White House is much more likely to tune out the radio interference from up north rather than getting upset.
What really worries me is that the sterile whining from left and right is obscuring a more important truth. There are signs of trouble in Canada's main market, where both the government and millions of Americans are massively in debt, the dollar is weakening and the public education system is giving off clear signs of crisis. Schools in states like Oregon are shutting down weeks early for lack of money, and not long ago a report came out saying half the inhabitants in greater Los Angeles were functionally illiterate.
People unable to read or write will not be buying Canadian-made cars or houses made of Canadian softwood lumber any time soon. This is alarming, since the most recent trade figures from Statistics Canada show our prosperity depends more and more on the U.S. The dirty little secret no one wants to talk about is that Canada is running large trade deficits with China, Japan and the European Union and would be in serious trouble if it weren't for the easy pickings down south.
So if the pessimists are right and the U.S. economy sinks into meltdown mode, there won't be any more fat contracts for Canadian firms, and that will have nothing to do with what the federal government did or didn't do about Iraq or <missile> <defence>. It strikes me that a chamber of commerce that really wanted to ensure its members thrived in the years ahead might be advised to kill off the alarmist rhetoric and instead do all it can to persuade its powerful friends in Washington to put their house in order. We'd all benefit -- big business, average Canadians and even those members of Parliament happy to stomp George Bush dolls.
So let's please devote our energies to studying the latest developments in the United States. There are fires smouldering down south, and we could soon be choking in a thick smoke which will be oblivious to simplistic chants of "America good" or "America bad."
).
