does free trade between canada and china make sense?

in a literal sense, not at all. an attempted free trade agreement with china - in literal terms - would create downward pressure on wages and living standards, because we cannot in good faith expect them to raise in a brutal dictatorship with minimal respect for human rights. free trade with the state-capitalist dictatorship in china is neither good nor bad but impossible.

this is different than a trade agreement with the united states, with europe, with australia or with japan.

but, a trade agreement with china that takes these concerns into consideration does make sense, so long as it explicitly ties the opening of markets to increasing labour standards.

my faith in the trudeau government's ability to put together a reasonable deal on this is both relatively high, in comparison to the other options, and pretty low, in absolute terms. this is an issue that needs to be tackled one way or another. we can't just decide to not deal with this. i'm likely to end up critical, perhaps extremely so, but i'd rather this guy is doing it than the other guy.

what i don't want to see is trudeau to come out swinging for some kind of dying neo-liberal order. that is tone deaf on every level - political suicide, and not in the national interest, either. it's not even reality any more, it's just delusional. magical thinking. there has to be some kind of serious push for increasing labour standards, and not as some kind of do-gooder progressivism but as hard-nosed economic realism. we'll get destroyed if we don't pay very close attention to this.

the neo-liberal order is dead. good riddance. let's adjust. we never liked it much, anyways.