A few months ago, the House of Commons International Trade Committee talked to International Trade Minister David Emerson about a free trade agreement with Korea. During his testimony at that time, Emerson referred to some studies his department had commissioned to assess the economic impact in Canada of a free trade agreement with Korea. NDP MP and committee member Peter Julian successfully moved a motion at Committee asking for those reports. I immediately filed an Access to Information Request to receive those reports and asked Emerson if he would not just release them. That was a few months ago.
In the meantime, the Canadian Auto Workers went about its own economic impact study of a Korea Free Trade Agreement (FTA). On Monday night, CAW president Buzz Hargrove told Emerson’s office it was going to release those studies today.
And then — in the sort of coincidence that makes reporters suspicious — the governnment’s economic impact studies that Julian and I had asked for were posted online at a government Web site some time around 8 pm Ottawa time with zero fanfare or announcement. We learned they were posted online when Hargrove told us at a morning press conference today.
Hargrove said that the government’s economic impact studies show that, even in the “best-case” scenario, a Korean FTA would have little positive impact on the Canadian economy. Indeed, one of the conclusions — written by Industry Canada researchers — says:
“An elimination of the Korean automotive tariff alone would have a negligible impact on Canadian automotive exports. Even a large increase in exports of parts or vehicles would be insignificant when compared to our overall exports.”
Back in June, Emerson told the international trade committee:
“The Canada-Korea potential free trade agreement does have the potential to offer substantial benefits to Canada, we've quantified them and modeled them, they're well in excess of a half a bill dollars, perhaps upwards into the $1.5 billion to $2 billion a year range. It's not that we're trying to get into a free trade agreement that is going to be harmful to Canada: quite the contrary.”
The CAW’s studies, you won’t be surprised to learn, show that a Korean FTA would cause massive job losses in the Canadian automotive sector.
In any event — I asked Emerson about the status of the Korean FTA negotations in a post-Question Period scrum on Monday and he said, “To be honest, we are nowhere near a free-trade agreement with Korea. “
Hargrove met with Emerson today and said their meeting was a good one and that Emerson seemed sympathetic to the points he was making.
Still not sure what all the secrecy was about when it comes to those economic impact studies and why they had to be quietly posted online at 8 pm. The only people who do that sort of thing are people who are usually trying to hide something …