Terence Corcoran: Trump, Carney take the wrecking ball to free trade

If it’s built by Canadian workers on Canadian docks, it should be made with Canadian steel and aluminum.

Auto parts cross the Canada-U.S. border six times on average before final assembly. In a trade crisis, that’s a vulnerability.
 
It’s time to build more cars right here at home with an All-In-Canada auto manufacturing network.

Since the middle of the past century, international trade has opened the global economy to spectacular growth, rising living standards and innovation. The World Trade Organization reports that international trade volume grew 4,400 per cent between 1950 and 2023, providing countries like Canada and the United States with lower-cost clothes, metals, manufactured products, phones and thousands of other products as part of a dynamic competitive process.

Today, under the influence of anti-free trade theorists on the right and left, one of the greatest economic policy concepts of all time — globalized free trade — is being crushed under a protectionist sledge hammer wielded by U.S. President Donald Trump and, now, by Liberal Leader Mark Carney, whose recent protectionist tweets echo those of Trump.

As Trump prepares his April 2 “Liberation Day” plans for more import tariffs, the global trading system developed over the past seven decades under the influence of free-market economic theories is being demolished. “Barriers to global trade rise at a pace not seen in decades,” the Wall Street Journal reported this week. Tariffs are being imposed by nations around the world, prompting Cornell trade professor Eswar Prasad to conclude that “We do seem to be on the threshold of a much broader if not an all-out trade war.”

All major nations seem to be wrapped in protectionist ideologies that are unlikely to