With the Throne Speech a one-day wonder, the Hair had nothing left to do but head for Brussels. The home of the European Union, Brussels today is more than a Mecca for tourists. It is here that the Hair has signed a tentative European trade treaty.
Nobody seems to care that the poor hairdresser had little time to rinse out a few intimate things before being hustled back onto that damn Airbus A310. The Hair needed a different set of lackey’s for the European trip than last week’s jaunt to Indonesia but where the Hair goes, so must go the hairdresser.
Back in the lacklustre House of Commons, the leave-behind lackeys were doing their best to answer every question with a fulsome tribute to the Hair’s European Trade deal. The only problem was that there is a terrible backlog of questions about the Senate that nobody on the government benches wants to answer. It tends to be a bit disjointed.
On top of that there is a serious lack of information available about the European trade deal and there are a limited number of talking points available to the Tory lackeys. All we seem sure about is that the Europeans are going to get our bacon and we are going to get their cheese. It sounds like on both sides of the pond, we all get clogged arteries.
We will not have a definitive analysis of this trade deal until we see what happens to prices on our favourite French wines. Based on present day trade balances with the European Union, Canada needed to negotiate hard. We are currently spending far more in Europe than they with us and we could ill afford any further advantage to Europe just to close this deal.
And we should not forget we were negotiating with the same snotty people who criticize our killing of baby seals for pelts and income in Newfoundland and Labrador. Maybe we should tell the Europeans to stop mistreating geese just to enlarge their livers.
Even as the Hair announces his greatest deal ever out of this trip, it is going to be at least a couple years before all the European countries agree to the deal and we start to see any changes that such a deal could produce. What we have learned about free trade deals is that you can make them sound good but the proof is in how they work out for all parties.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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