Opinion: Removing trade barriers is worth the political price

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An 1849 French adage coined by novelist, journalist and critic Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr is now a cliché that says “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” It remains a relevant insight 176 years later, as illustrated by last week’s Brunswick News report “Holt government promotes freer trade, but only to a point.”

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It has long been noted, since the first free trade agreements with the United States, that in many ways our international trade has fewer barriers of questionable merit than our trade within Canada.

This has been a contentious, periodically heated controversy that has waxed and waned over my entire career as a journalist in New Brunswick the last 44 years. What’s most obvious is that after premiers change, sooner or later with government tenders an out-of-province firm will win a valuable bid. Cue the outrage that local firms had failed to be competitive and might need to cut back employees or work harder to maintain profit levels.

If government then reneges, it gets sued, and taxpayers lose, too, with long-term protectionist barriers created to prevent such controversies.

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That’s a predictable political response to quiet protest and help a government survive, but it’s the worst possible response for our collective best interests in the long haul. First, it makes local firms lazy rather than forcing them to remain sharply competitive, which is what keeps economies healthy and products and services affordable. In the long term, it increases profits and employment too, as well as tax revenue.

For a small province like New Brunswick, protectionism becomes a self-defeating move as those we prevent or discourage from competing here will in turn do the same to make it hard for our capable entrepreneurs to expand to other provinces. It’s a cycle that helps keep New Brunswick a less economically successful province than it could and should be.

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The “more things change…” adage ought to be a caution, not an excuse to never change. Ignore the skirmish on the issue we’re seeing between Premier Susan Holt and the Progressive Conservative opposition, which is unhelpful political theatre perpetuating the status quo.

It’s widely agreed that interprovincial barriers are more harmful than positive, yet they persist. That should tell us different approaches are needed to address perceived problems.

One obvious method, and it is used sometimes in tendering, is to insert requirements that out-of-province firms must whenever possible hire local residents, keeping taxes flowing to the province and maximizing spinoff . That helps level the field for smaller local firms. If we lessen the usual fears that create trade barriers, it’s a win-win when our own firms venture into bidding for contracts elsewhere with no trade barriers.

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Meanwhile, Premier Holt has eliminated half of the barriers the previous government maintained, and has promised to eliminate them all. She has plenty of time remaining in her mandate to tackle the rest, and we must acknowledge we live in an increasingly chaotic world, with other serious challenges the province and Ottawa must meet.

Change is certain, but exactly what changes is not. We need to avoid the trap inherent in the old adage; it’s a valuable observation, not an inevitability.

Norbert Cunningham is a Brunswick News columnist and a retired editorial page editor for Moncton’s Times & Transcript.

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