I do not pretend to know everything about the economy or free-trade agreements and all of that stuff, but it seems kind of fishy to me when our chief ally on this continent would rather thumb his nose at our beef, our lumber, our industry, and our oil, rather than take it at a profit from us.
I don’t have a bachelors degree in business or anything, but I am curious to know why we would choose to maintain a charade as one-sided as the North American Free Trade Agreement seems to be, at least to me, in the face of recent events.
According to the Government of Canada’s website, approximately 75.7 per cent of Canada’s top merchandise exports were destined to our NAFTA partners in 2012, and of that amount, 46 per cent of our country’s GDP for that year resulted from Canada-US trade.
We are also apparently the main foreign supplier of energy for the United States, a fact, perhaps, that President Obama was unaware of when he decided to kill the Keystone Pipeline last week.
Is it just me or is seven years a long time to stall on something like that?
Could that have been an example of Obama’s hope and change again?
I confess, I leave decisions that monumental to those better equipped to deal with the situation.
However, I do feel that the pipeline should be the icing on the metaphorical cake for this country.
I have heard Keystone referred to as a symbol of the arguments for and against clean, alternative energies, and I know the pipeline project often served as a flashpoint for heated discussions in rooms that the public were never invited into during its seven-year ordeal before the American Senate.
For myself, I think that it would have been a good thing for both of our countries.
Sure, there was some work that needed to be done to ensure that people’s rights were being respected along the pipeline’s route, the environment needed to remain protected, and honestly, our end-product required a little bit more refining, but for Obama to sneer about our ‘dirty’ oil, it was a bit much to stomach.
With a national debt that has run into the tens of trillions, why does our non-fiscally responsible Uncle Sam even have a seat at the big kids table anymore?
Realistically, I think this was just blowback because Justin Trudeau told him Canada was pulling out of the fight in Syria.
Keystone could have been a real game-changer for us, ironically, in much the same way that the AVRO and Blackberry could have.
Instead, just like always, we let Uncle Sam dictate the script of our lives again.
Who knows what the next few years will have in store for us, now that we have a Liberal government.
You have to spend money to make money, after all.
