Quote:
Originally Posted by mooguy
I had no problem when it was just the US & Canada. So much of our economy was already intertwined {ie Auto-pact} it just seemed natural. Also it was free trade between two advanced and wealthy economies with high wages. The problem was when Mexico {at the demand of our corporations} was invited to join.
All of a sudden you had 2 high wage countries having to compete with Mexican labour rates where the current minimum wage is $5......a DAY! Any idiot could see that was going to lead to a mass exodus of industrial jobs to ultra cheap labour Mexico which is why our corporations wanted it so badly. They say all the money they could save by moving operations to Mexico. They took the money from all the tax cuts they were given and quickly used that money to open new plants in Mexico so they could shut the ones in the US & Canada.
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Well you should have had a problem had you been more involved with manufacturing across a broader spectrum of our economy back in the 80's.
You would have easily seen, and been able to foretell the future to anyone with the ability to think in a linear fashion by watching the first outcome of signing a deal with a country with huge swaths of it's population enjoying lesser wage rates and benefits.
Ontario lost many of it's smaller manufacturing business's to right-to-work states in the U.S. and our government learned nothing from that. Far from it, they willy-nilly went and invited Mexico, a whole country full of disadvantaged, to enter into the compact.
It has always galled me governments never considered the aspect of corporations taking full advantage of the possibility of moving lock-stock and barrel to places within agreement countries that enjoy cheaper wages, services and other COL indicators.
This phenomena has given rise to the anti-globalist movements gaining steam and voice to their portents of doom........and.........hence........to TRUMP's ascendancy to the throne.
Various governments are going to reap what they have sown ignoring the obvious and thinking only of the short term benefits to the economy by now having to deal with an entity that has absolutely no interest and no reason to.
This event is going to be akin to the veritable 'bull in a china shop' in it's scope of causing governmental scramble to adapt and there will be casualties the like of which the middle aged unemployed have been the veritable billboard poster we've ignored.
Instead of arguing futilely across a table over whose picking up the dinner tab, our leaders should have been POURING revenues into research and development to get the first long step out of the starter's blocks when the gun went off. Our future is dependent upon forethought.
When the simple things like a lathe operator in Alliston Ontario feeding a family of four has to compete with a robot in Taiwan needing only a drop of oil and a dust-off once a week doesn't occur to them as reality and they continue to focus upon their own little fifedom for re-election, I lose all faith in their competency to govern.
Tighten your belts folks as the hits are just beginning and will make McGuinty/Wynne's E-health, electrical, and provincial pension plan follies seem like the golden days.
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