Thank you for the question. That's very thoughtful.
I wish it were the case that economists could sit around a table, simply agree on the facts, go back and forth with the assumptions and methodologies, and come up with something that was mutually acceptable. I think that shows more optimism in the economics profession than even I have, and I'm optimistic as an economist.
Frankly, I don't think that's possible in this case. The fact that the government had 14 rounds of negotiations with the Koreans before even producing the first economy-wide study of the impacts of this agreement they've been working to reach proves that for them the economic analysis is an afterthought. They were determined to negotiate an agreement with Korea regardless of what their economic study indicated; otherwise they would have done the study first and identified the concrete sectors that could actually gain from this.
I have the sense, as you alluded to, that the thing was driven from the beginning by political considerations and perhaps institutional considerations. The government wanted to sign a free trade agreement because they hadn't signed one for a while. Remember, there's a whole department of officials on Sussex Drive whose job is to sign free trade agreements. That creates an institutional degree of momentum to sign the agreement just for the sake of signing the agreement. I think that's a bad error in strategic judgment.
The government should have conducted a very careful sector-by-sector analysis to identify the sectors that could possibly win, identify the costs and the risks, and then make a judgment that the benefits were greater than the costs.
So far, apart from a very small number of agricultural sectors, particularly the beef industry, it is not clear at all who in Canada can possibly benefit from this. But we have identified many important sectors that are very much at risk.