Parochial Canada

[Edward Campbell]

I read most of what the Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson writes; I disagree, vehemently, with about ⅓ of it, I’m neutral towards another ⅓ of it but I find myself nodding in general agreement with the remaining ⅓; this, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Good Grey Globe is from that final ⅓:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080201.wcosimp01/BNStory/Front/home

Parochial Canada has a lot to learn from other nations

JEFFREY SIMPSON

From Friday's Globe and Mail
February 1, 2008 at 4:59 AM EST

The saddest but most revealing item in yesterday's newspaper came from Alberta's Energy Minister, Mel Knight.

Asked about Norway's policy on putting oil revenues into a fund for the future, he essentially said Alberta didn't have anything to learn from that country.

Presumably, Alberta also doesn't have anything to learn from Norway about sequestering greenhouse-gas emissions, or placing a carbon tax on emissions. After all, Norway is only a leader in both fields, with people from all over the world flocking to the country to see how it's done.

It's tempting to say Mr. Knight's ostrich attitude is typically Albertan, but it's too often typically Canadian. Spread out beside the United States, Canadians seldom think they have much, if anything, to learn from the wide world out there. After all, our bookstore chain, Chapters Indigo, insists on its walls that "The World Needs More Canada." Apparently, a lot of Canadians believe it.

On file after file, Canadians could learn from others -- not always to copy but at least to think about new ways of doing things. But we either don't pay attention or, if we do, we insist that our way is better.

Health care is the classic example. The whole industrialized world organizes health care somewhat differently than Canada. But we myopically insist our system is the world's best, when not a single international comparative study supports that contention. We're just fed a steady diet of fear-mongering that, were we to change our system, ever so slightly, it would be the slippery slope toward "two-tier" U.S.-style medicine.

We have had endless problems with offshore fisheries, including the disappearance of the East Coast cod stocks. Part of the reason is the common property basis for organizing the fishery that has led to bureaucracy galore, overfishing and a social welfare system embedded in the "industry."

Successful fishing countries, such as New Zealand and Iceland, which used to have all these problems, dropped the common-property regime in favour of transferable- and owned-quotas. But do you think people in Newfoundland or elsewhere will accept that these countries do things better? Not on your life.

Our car industry is lobbying governments to slow down tough vehicle-emission standards, fearing great job losses. The Japanese government has already mandated even tougher domestic standards for its vehicles. That country's car manufacturers will be even better able to compete in North America in a few years with cleaner technologies.

Do we have anything to learn from them? Apparently not. So they will continue to eat our lunch.

The Scandinavian countries try hard to limit poverty, yet they have among the world's most productive economies. Any lessons there? Apparently not. The French depend on nuclear power for 70 to 80 per cent of their electricity. The recent British energy policy paper says that country, too, is going strongly nuclear. Any lessons there? Apparently not.

No country scatters its foreign aid as widely and ineffectively as Canada. Lessons? No country's refugee policy is as open to abuse as Canada's. Lessons? No federal country's upper house, or senate, is unelected. Lessons?

It sometimes seems that Canada winds up doing the right thing, having exhausted many other options. It took two decades before we cleaned up our fiscal mess in Ottawa. It took decades of useless, debilitating existential debates about the Constitution before we realized what a waste of time they were.

We still haven't figured out how to make federal-provincial relations much more than a whinefest. We haven't figured out how to focus on the most important issue for the country's future prosperity: productivity and competitiveness.

We're way, way behind the curve on climate change, having wasted years fooling around with policies guaranteed not to work, such as voluntarism, subsidies and exhortation.

We're parochial, in other words, too often unwilling to examine what others are doing. Not that they necessarily have all the answers, but at least they are asking better questions.

When we do look outward, it's usually to the United States, a very different country with mesmerizing strengths and gross weaknesses.

We don't seem able to lift our sights or our game very often, and so settle for a variation on Mr. Knight's rejoinder that all's just swell at home.

I’m nowhere near smart enough to “know” (as Simpson implies he does) if Norwegians have substantially better ideas than Albertans or if Icelanders are better at fisheries management than Newfoundlanders but I agree, completely, with Simpson’s main point: we are parochial.

We are wilfully blind to better ideas if they have not been spoon-fed to us by our own, “distinctively Canadian” media. We are more jingoistic, in our own way, that Victorian era Brits ever were. We tell ourselves that “we’re the greatest,” primarily because to admit that we might not be the world’s very best at absolutely everything might be to admit that our big, rich, brash and noisy American neighbours might just be doing something right – maybe even doing a lot of things right, maybe, horror of horrors, doing some things better than we do.

We have allowed out long standing, juvenile, knee-jerk anti-Americanism (harmless enough in itself) to warp into a general sense of our own superiority.

Message to Canadians: we are not better, never have been and are highly unlikely ever to be. We can be as good as anyone else and, now and again, at the top of the heap, when (if) we apply ourselves – we’ve done so, now and again, in the past; it’s likely that we’re as good as it gets in a very, very few endeavours today; and we might be world beaters, once in a while, in the future. The latter is highly unlikely unless and until we shake of the parochial blinders.

 

[RangerRay]

I do agree with the gist of Mr. Simpson's article, especially when he touched on healthcare:

Health care is the classic example. The whole industrialized world organizes health care somewhat differently than Canada. But we myopically insist our system is the world's best, when not a single international comparative study supports that contention. We're just fed a steady diet of fear-mongering that, were we to change our system, ever so slightly, it would be the slippery slope toward "two-tier" U.S.-style medicine.

I'm sick of the constant comparisons between our dangerously inefficient universal system, and the "evil" American system.  There are other models for healthcare for us to study.

I do find it ironic that many (if not most) Canadians view themselves as "worldly" when they are just as ignorant of the world as they accuse our American cousins of being.

 

[Edward Campbell]

This, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from he Globe and Mail, not untendered F35 purchases, not long gun registries and not census forms is what's wrong with this country. This, in two words, is greed and fear:

Canada and the Pacific: We dither while the world moves on

Lawrence Herman

From Thursday's Globe and Mail Published on Thursday, Aug. 26, 2010

Canada claims to be a Pacific Ocean country. We have a front seat on the Pacific Rim. The Harper government trumpets its Pacific Gateway initiative. We say we’re a natural partner for Asian countries and take transpacific trade seriously. Yet, Canada is sitting out one of the biggest games in town, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade talks.

Some heavy hitters are in these negotiations, starting with the United States but also Australia, Chile, New Zealand, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and Peru. Malaysia is now seeking to join. While China and Japan are not participating, this is still a pretty impressive club.

Yet, so far, Canada has sat on the sidelines. That’s because the price of admission to the talks is to put agriculture on the table – and that’s a card Canada doesn’t want to play.

A number of participants, notably Australia and New Zealand, are cool to letting Canada join unless we agree to negotiate foreign access to our dairy and poultry sectors. Both Australia and New Zealand opened up their own dairy and poultry markets years ago. But Canada still maintains a closed system called supply management that prohibits all but an insignificant volume of foreign dairy, egg and poultry imports.

If this were based on sound trade policy or economic thinking, it might be defensible. But it’s really based on pure domestic politics and fear of the electoral price that would be exacted by doing anything lowering the protectionist wall around the dairy, egg and poultry industries that – as circumstances have it – are largely concentrated in rural Ontario and Quebec.

Canada maintains this supply management regime – sanctioned in the last set of trade negotiations that created the World Trade Organization – by prohibitively high duties, some approaching 300 per cent. By shielding the market from foreign competition, marketing boards control domestic supply and keep the farm-gate prices for these products high.

So politically sacred is this system that a unanimous House of Commons resolution in 2005 instructed our negotiators at the WTO Doha round trade talks to refuse any outcome that made the slightest change to these high tariff walls.

This all-party resolution means that, rather than influencing the course of the Doha round talks on agriculture, Canadian representatives are stuck with a non-negotiable defensive position, fighting off every attempt to whittle away Canada’s agricultural tariff walls. Unfortunately, this has tended to isolate Canada – virtually the last holdout for maintaining supply management – and to weaken our influence in the other areas in the WTO negotiations.

Meantime, well-respected opinion says supply management is a costly and outmoded protectionist system that should have been consigned to the trade dustbin years ago. Among those highly critical of Canadian policy are the Conference Board of Canada, the C.D. Howe Institute and the Montreal Economic Institute. Even agriculture groups such as the Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance, made up of both domestic producers and exporters, have criticized Ottawa for its unbending support of supply management and for sacrificing Canada’s agri-food export interests in the bargain.

Matched against reasoned opinion are the powerful dairy, poultry and egg producer lobby groups, whose valuable quotas would be affected if lower priced imports were allowed in the door. So well-organized are they that Canadian contingents at Doha round ministerial meetings are dominated by these farmer representatives who make sure nothing agreed to by Canada in any way limits the extraordinary tariff protection they enjoy.

One must wonder about the wisdom of so narrow a trade policy paradigm. It’s not unique, of course, to the supply managed sector. Canada pursues other policies that appear equally limited and often quixotic – such as defending our asbestos exports and our annual seal hunt – where arguably the damage done to Canada’s international reputation far outweighs the economic interests at stake.

This isn’t a crusade against all aspects of supply managed industries or the need to limit the exigencies of price volatility in these sectors. Nor is this an attack on the virtues of the family farm. Rather, it’s an argument for Canada’s negotiating position at the WTO and in a range of other international forums, including Canadian entry to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to not be held hostage to narrow self-interests and internal lobbying pressures.

To play a leading role on the international stage, at the WTO and in Asia-Pacific trade, Canada’s position can’t be hamstrung by retrograde policies that are out of step with the rest of the world and inconsistent with Canada’s broader national interests.

Lawrence Herman, a former Canadian diplomat, practises international trade law at Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP in Toronto.

The fear is found in both the politicians and the farmers. The farmers are afraid to compete because they know that competing means innovating, becoming more productive, and they are afraid to do that. A bit of greed is involved, too; why expend the effort, why take the risks and why go to the expense of innovating and making oneself more productive when one can hide behind a nice big, unproductive tariff barrier that actually harms ALL Canadians? Farmers are not unique; fear of competition, fear of becoming productive appears to be in our, Canadian, DNA.

Those of us who have lived in Ottawa for a while have seen the wrath of angry Québec dairy farmers; we know they are lawless and unafraid of the police – we know, in fact, that the police, city, provincial, national, parliamentary etc have been told to lay off because keeping Québec “happy” or, at least, not too unhappy, matters more than anything else, including the rule of law.

Sad.

 

[Jed]

There is a world of difference between farmers in Ontario and Quebec and those in the prairie farmer's. Farmer's in the prairies have been scrambling hard for decades to achieve efficiency. The profit margins that they run are next to nothing and the farms have gotten to be so large they barely employ anyone outside of the immediate family.

With the caveat of not being intimately familiar with the Ontario Diary farm business, I believe they are quite a bit smaller and much more greatly supported due to international tariff policies etc.

 

[Rifleman62]

ERC: you, I believe, go down to Texas for part of the winter. What do you think of grocery prices in the US compared to Canada?

IMO and others, we estimate at least +30% more. Additionally, our packaging is getting smaller i.e. ice cream was 1.89 liter, now 1.5 liter with a price increase; potato chips now 235 grams vice 250 grams; a dozen eggs $0.89.

In the scheme of things, food prices are very important to the bottom line of farmers and users. Somewhere in the middle we are getting ripped off.

Marketing Boards. We have them, the US does not.

 

[Edward Campbell]

ERC: you, I believe, go down to Texas for part of the winter. What do you think of grocery prices in the US compared to Canada?

IMO and others, we estimate at least +30% more. Additionally, our packaging is getting smaller i.e. ice cream was 1.89 liter, now 1.5 liter with a price increase; potato chips now 235 grams vice 250 grams; a dozen eggs $0.89.

In the scheme of things, food prices are very important to the bottom line of farmers and users. Somewhere in the middle we are getting ripped off.

Marketing Boards. We have them, the US does not.

You guesstimate of 30% is probably a bit low. I just paid nearly $4.00 for a dozen eggs in my local grocery store (Your Independent Grocer - affiliated with Loblaws I believe); typically we would pay just over half that, $2.00/dozen in Texas (Walmart or Krogers). I just, a few days ago, bought a nice T-bone steak, on special for just under $10.00/pound. - it's usually about $12.00/pound; in Texas we would never consider paying more than about $5.00/pound - and often less - for a nicer, thicker cut of meat. A few things, pork for example, appear to be about the same price in both countries but, generally, my friend in Texas reckons she spends about half as much on food as does her sister in Vancouver.


Edit: typo

 

[Rifleman62]

In San Antonio, we shop mainly at HEB. We find pork and chicken considerbly less i.e. boneless chichen breasts and pork tenderloin average $2.50 per lb.

Beef, prime grade (the top grade, one up from AAA), Rib Eye, $10.

My daughter, in the OK, not shopping at the PX, states she gets two carts of grocery for the same amount of dollars as compare in Edm.

Let alone a good Australian Shiraz for $9.99 a liter, Heineken 12  @ $12, or Grey Goose @$35 for 1.75 liter.

Here in West Kelowna, living a mile from Mission Hill, and Quails' Gate, it is cheaper to buy the same wine in AB by approx 20% +.

Ah, but we have free health care. Roll on tax freedom day.

 

[acooper]

Living in Windsor, ON, and having grown up in the Thumb region of Michigan, I cross the border for shopping all the time. Prices are SIGNIFICANTLY higher in Ontario than they are in Michigan. Milk is around $2 / gallon. If I watch the sales, I can get boneless skinless chicken breasts for $1.77 / lb (fresh). If I could manage it, I'd do all my grocery shopping in the US. And don't get me started on other types of shopping. EVERYTHING is cheaper in the US. Except maybe Pelee Island wine, but there's other cheap wine alternatives available in the states that make even Pelee's local prices seem expensive (I'm thinking Trader Joe's Two Buck Chuck vs Pelee at about $8-9 CDN / bottle)

I personally also think the marketing boards are a big problem. From what I know of them, they seem to favor the big producers, and stifle the little guys. I was AMAZED to find out that if I bought eggs from a coworker, that could be considered illegal. In Michigan, raw milk is about the only thing that's so restricted like that, and you can get around that by buying a share of cow...