Our Best Hope for the White House

Back in November 2004 my wife Laurie and I were among a couple of hundred Calgarians invited to the United States consulate to watch the U.S. Presidential election results. We locals were allowed a mock vote and – who’d have guessed it? – George W. Bush squeaked in by exactly one ballot. In an election that Bush won decisively, allegedly redneck Alberta was already beginning to lean Democrat. With Bush and the Republicans crumbling in the intervening years, it’s all but certain Albertans would prefer a Democrat in the White House this fall. But would a blue victory really be what we need?

The Democrats have cultivated an aura of an outfit on a mission to make the world love America. Their promises to be nicer to everyone, the foreign affectations of leaders like Senator “Jean” Kerry and the top party brass’s swooning at Third World thugs have all seen to that. If the basic premises are that America is hated and the world’s affection must be regained, then maintaining existing good relationships – like, say, formalized free trade treaties – should go without saying.

Yet that’s not what the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination have been saying. Hillary Clinton, whose husband Bill convinced Congress to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement, now claims to have been against NAFTA before being against NAFTA was cool. Senator Barack Obama routinely – and falsely – claims that NAFTA has killed a million U.S. manufacturing jobs.

The past two years have seen a tsunami-like wave of protectionist sentiment building among interest groups that make up the Democratic Party, a wave the leadership has decided is better to surf than drown in. Virtually all economists agree NAFTA’s been a net boon to the U.S. economy, consumers and workers. But, as one commentator recently pointed out, “opportunistic fear-mongering” is the Democrats’ new orthodoxy. The party’s as anti-trade as it’s ever been in its history.

Most Canadians nowadays support free trade at the same time as they back U.S. politicians who oppose free trade. I’ve written before how it’s crucial that Alberta maintain free access to the U.S. market, something we spent the first 80 years of our history fighting for. It’s easy to reply that the Americans will always want our oil – but so superficial as to be meaningless. Tens of billions of dollars of Alberta’s exports are things other than energy, everything from electrical equipment to plastics to beef. All of that is vulnerable to protectionism.

Others say don’t worry, it’s just a campaign pose; cooler heads and sound economic advice will prevail. The mini-scandal over Obama’s adviser’s allegedly off-the-record talk with Canadian diplomats suggests there may be something to that. Then again, Clinton and Obama are doctrinaire leftists, something ignored by the Canadian news media. Someone once quipped that Bill Clinton’s only genuine core beliefs were free trade and free love. His wife shares neither belief, while Obama has voted against new free-trade treaties, so perhaps it’s no pose.

Tearing up a free-trade agreement would cost the U.S. economy many billions. But just because something is destructive, even self-destructive, doesn’t mean politicians won’t do it. Obama’s basic international trade policy is a non sequitur of almost demented proportions. “I’ve talked to workers who have seen their plants shipped overseas as a consequence of bad trade deals like NAFTA, literally seeing equipment unbolted from the floors of factories and shipped to China,” he said in a recent TV debate. It’s gibberish. No NAFTA signatory is “overseas,” and there’s no free-trade deal with China.

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