Trump’s Tariffs: We should have listened to feminists forty years ago | University of Ottawa
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Donald Trump’s threatened trade war became reality on March 4th, as the U.S. President imposed 25 per cent tariffs on most Canadian goods. Experts have pointed out that Trump’s unjustified trade war will deeply harm workers, farmers, and families in both countries. Amid the President’s repeated threats against Canadian sovereignty since he took office on January 20th, many are claiming that our economy has become far too reliant on the United States. This is exactly what Canadian feminists warned us about nearly forty years ago.Hundreds of paper records in the Women’s Archives at the University of Ottawa, where I work, document feminist opposition to the ratification of CUSFTA (Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement) in 1988 and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) in 1994. The National Action Committee on the Status of Women and its then vice president, economist Marjorie Griffin Cohen, claimed that a Mulroney-Reagan free trade deal would have an outsized impact on women workers in the manufacturing sector. After the implementation of CUSFTA, tens of thousands of workers lost their unionized jobs in the garment industry, where women accounted for 90% of the labour force.
  • Dearche
    21·
    6 days ago

    To be honest, quite a few people’ve been saying this for the last half century or so, even including a few prime ministers. But saying that they were right all along ignores all the benefits we’ve been getting this entire time by integrating our economy with the US’s. We don’t know what sort of position we would’ve been in if we avoided NAFTA and other trade agreements with the US.

    Maybe the same thing would’ve happened anyways, just that we’d be in an even weaker position due to a lack of economic growth. Or maybe we would’ve had tighter relations with the EU instead, making Trump a minor bump rather than a national crisis.

    But we can’t know, because we don’t know that timeline. It might’ve been better, but it also might’ve been worse, and dwelling on it is useless pandering. We need to reorient our current economy to minimize damages and diversify as fast as possible. And only once we’re through this crisis, we can look back and figure out what lessons can be learned from this whole ordeal, not wish that things went a different way.

  • barnaclebutt@lemmy.world
    46·
    6 days ago

    Lol, that’s the longest 50:50 hindsight I’ve ever heard. They aren’t wrong, but that’s quite a stretch of a told-you-so.

    • KichaeEnglish
      101·
      6 days ago

      Free trade with the US made a lot of people richer, but it made a lot of people poorer and more vulnerable. And it came with an explicit abdication of soverignty in the name of foreign business interests.

      We directly teaded foreign private money for the rights of communities to self-govern.

      This is not “something was said in a vacuum decades ago, and it just happened to be right,” this is “this thing that we openly gave away at the time, and has continually been biting us in the ass ever since, is something that was an open concern before it was agreed to, but was completely dismissed because some people stood to make a lot of money”.

      The US has always been a fascist, imperialst state. It has always made unreasonable demands on us. It was only a matter of time before an ideological fascist took control, and it was inevitable that the country would continue to take liberties with us.

      This is not a crapshoot. It’s “I was paying even the slightest bit of attention”, and you’re almost certainly only being mocking about it because the group identified here is “feminists”.

      • barnaclebutt@lemmy.world
        1·
        6 days ago

        There are a lot of marginalized groups, not just feminists that hold the same or similar viewpoints. Like I said, I don’t necessarily disagree.