One of the dangers in dealing with trade policy or any other area of public policy is if you consider it to be the be-all and end-all. Trade and trade policy is not an objective in itself; what we're trying to achieve is economic performance. The IMF tells us that since we got the fiscal books right, the economy, cycle over cycle, is performing more or less at capacity.
In fact, I read The Globe and Mail, so I saw that report, so it's doing its job in reporting. It indicates that yes, there are some serious problems out there that the government might want to address, but they are not problems of trade policy. You don't solve child poverty or any of these things by flipping trade policy on its head and saying no more imports. You don't, on the other side of it, solve some trade problems that you may have by fixing your trade problems without addressing, for example, the social policy mix, the education mix, infrastructure, and the macroeconomic policy framework that you have.
Trade policy and trade is a necessary but not sufficient answer to the problems that Mr. Julian mentioned or that others may wish to bring up. But to pin the responsibility for increasing child poverty rates and the bad news on this upon trade policies that we have been conducting since 1948 is, I think, a complete distortion of history.