Diversification Necessary to Retake Position as America’s Largest Trading Partner

Original image by Paul Lowry, licensed under CC-BY . https://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_lowry/2770193028

PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release

DIVERSIFICATION NECESSARY TO RETAKE POSITION AS AMERICA’S LARGEST TRADING PARTNER

Victoria, BC - 8 Nov 2021 - With $441.7 billion dollars in trade over the last nine months, China has now overtaken Canada as the United States’ largest trading partner. The 11.6% drop in trade is largely the result of a declining oil sector, with the price of oil sitting at half of its 2014 value. This decline in oil trade with the United States will continue as countries around the world work toward reducing and eliminating their fossil fuel usage. Canada was an energy behemoth, but with the rapid drop in oil value, the time has come to diversify our trade portfolio, both in terms of products offered and in where we do our business.

“The days of relying on the oil patch to fuel Canadian Trade with the United States are swiftly coming to an end. We need to seek new avenues of trade that are not reliant on fossil fuel extraction,” says Shawn Gray, the Pirate Party of Canada’s International Trade, Small Business and Tourism critic. Mining, quarrying, oil and gas extraction account for 8.21% of Canada’s GDP, grossly outweighed by real estate, rental and leasing at 12.88% and manufacturing at 10.55% according to StatsCanada’s August 2015 numbers. Despite this, the current and prior governments have continued to push for growth in the oil sector at the expense of manufacturing, as evidenced by the sacrifice of the automotive manufacturing industry in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. As the closest neighbour to the United States, we have the unique ability to provide products and services faster, at a lower shipping cost than companies from China and elsewhere around the world. We need to diversify our output, help small businesses access national and international supply and sales markets, and leverage Canada’s digital literacy in order to retake our position as America’s primary trading partner.

The Pirate Party of Canada is a federal political party focused on thoughtful information policy reform, genuine democracy, civil liberties, open data, and the freedom of the Internet. You can find out more online at www.pirateparty.ca .

###

Category: Economy, International Agreements, International Issues, Newsroom, Press Release, TPP. Tags: , , , , , , , , .
for this entry.

More information

>>>Pourquoi le Parti Pirate?<<<

Why Pirate Party?

1. Open Democracy

One of our main founding principles was Open Government. This means an Open Data policy with proactive disclosure and free access to government data. This will allow anyone to scrutinize and catch any error, negligence or corruption early on. Open Government also means increased transparency, and giving constituents real voices. This can be achieved with electoral reform .

2. Mincome / Basic Income Guarantee (B.I.G.)

Unemployment and income inequality is on the rise and we risk a breakdown of social cohesion without a system for resource distribution as we face increased automation. We're shifting from a bureaucratic culture of constant work-demands to a culture of passion, joy, and learning for the sake of learning.

Mincome will lead to cost savings and create a sustainable economy. See our press release for how that can be achieved.

3. Autonomy and Decentralization

We believe that the world works best when individuals are making informed decisions. It is our goal to get all information to all people, so they may be more informed voters, consumers, participants, and teachers. We do not need to force information culture & the hacker ethic onto people we can simply allow them to choose access. We believe the right to choose our identity, name, and appearance is inalienable.

4. Copyright and Patent Reform
Copyright and patent's main purpose was for propagation of culture and innovation. Our current copyright and patent laws are continuously being corrupted due to lobbying by copyright and patent monopolist. These monopolist refuses to innovate and provide wider access and pass on the savings from the new lower distribution cost. Instead the copyright and patent terms keeps getting extended to benefit the few to the detriment of the public interest. The opposite should happen. Copyright and patent terms should be shortened since our new information infrastructure (i.e. the internet) have brought us cheaper and faster means of distributing media contents and information. Mandatory licensing, owner's rights to a non-DRM product, open access to research data and shorter copyright term are some of the natural changes that is needed if we want to create a more open and progressive society. This will ensure future artist and innovator are not hampered by patent and copyright gatekeepers who uses rent seeking law for anti-competitive purposes.

Human beings increasingly have a moral duty to share information with one another. Libraries are stuck in the last century, enforcing artificial scarcity on digital content. If libraries were upgraded for the modern age, we would no longer need filesharing. And let's face it, watching and listening to whatever you want to is fun. It breaks down arbitrary global borders of access and creates a global culture defined by people- not by corporations.

At the Pirate Party- we believe more information leads to better decisions. We believe that more voices leads to better compromises. We believe in Canadians.

Our democracy need a serious upgrade and Pirate Party aims to change politics to the way it should be.

Archives

Creative Commons

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Pirate Party of Canada

https://www.pirateparty.ca/