Thanks for the opportunity.
As an economist over more than 50 years of study and teaching, I oppose the TPP because it's about neither “free” nor “trade”. I'll give you a 55-minute lecture in two minutes.
The point that I think people have to realize is that when you cite economists and economists' models, the model of free trade that predicts some benefits from free trade does not predict any increase in jobs from free trade. It predicts that we will produce more of the goods that we're relatively good at producing and import goods that we're relatively bad at producing, compared with other countries. Therefore, the model does not predict any job growth.
What the model does say is that you'll get efficiency benefits from producing the things you're good at. The problem here is that it's also a job situation. To make that prediction of growth in efficiency, you have to assume that you have a full-employment economy. Tell me two countries in the world that have had full employment in the last 10 years or can predict it.
First of all, that doesn't exist. Second, when we have growth in some industries and losses of jobs in other industries, what's the job content of those industries? The so-called petrostate, which one government wanted us to become, pushed the oil industry or the fossil fuels industry, which is highly capital-intensive—i.e., the number of jobs per million dollars produced is very low—so that we ended up both encouraging an industry where there are very few jobs and losing industries, as Ontario knows, where there are a lot of jobs.
I will end by citing the Macdonald royal commission, the first big promoter of trade in Canada. They said it's a leap of faith, and the only benefit we would get from it is the psychological benefit of feeling that we are one of the first countries to adopt free trade.