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Canada-UK Trade: you don’t need a treaty to trade?
via CentreRight by Jim McConalogue on March 09, 2008
To celebrate Commonwealth Day, Brent Cameron has written a paper (published by Global Vision but not yet linked), entitled Building the Transatlantic Bridge: The potential for Canada-UK trade. It argues that, under the terms of globalization, the global economy is undergoing a state of evolution in which new rules/networks are being established and new markets are being propelled into the mainstream. The accompanying press statement says that the Commonwealth countries, and Canada and the UK in particular, have a natural trade advantage which should be exploited in the age of globalisation.
Take a read when it is published online – it caught my eye because of its central observation on page 3: “The UK trades as much with the United States as with its EU partners, and yet no free trade treaty with the US exists. Canada’s exports to the UK in 2004 were 25 percent higher than the year before, and again, no free trade treaty exists between us. Australian exports to Canada have increased at an average rate of nearly 4 per cent each year for the last decade – again, no free trade treaty in place.” No treaty required.
So, a lesson for Europe: you don’t need a treaty to trade (unless of course you are after something else). Which, I would assume, comes back to Syed Kamall’s (MEP) saying, ‘Governments do not trade with each other – people do’.
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