Canadian Economics: Lies by the Government Paid for by the Public

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is an agency for the deception of the public at public expense. Almost any snatch of a CBC news broadcast or public policy discussion will, on examination, be found to encapsulate a lie.

A meme currently being foisted on the public by the CBC is that trade protectionism hurts the public by raising prices. The inference being that higher prices due to trade protectionism hurt every Canadian.

That is the lie.

The purpose of trade protectionism is to raise wages of people who will produce the goods that would otherwise be imported from collapsible factories in Bangladesh, Chinese electronics assembly plants with anti-suicide nets, etc. So yes, tariffs raise prices but they also raise incomes of working people. So trade protectionism makes many working people better off at the expense mainly of those in the FIRE and globalized sectors of the economy. Protectionism would also allow Canada to rebuild some of its battered manufacturing sector that was undermined by NAFTA and devastated by free trade with the sweat-shop economies.

Yes protectionism results in retaliatory measures, but what do low-wage economies buy from Canada? Not much. Seventy-seven point four percent of Canadian exports go to the US and Mexico which are largely free of protectionist tariffs against Canadian goods. The rest consists in those incredibly cheap  shoes and shirts, and omputers and car parts that Canadians used to make for one another but now buy in large quantities from exploiters of sweated Asian labor.

In fact, a protected US Market to which Canadians have free access by virtue of the NAFTA agreement would provide huge opportunities for Canadian manufacturing.