The trade deal has been referenced repeatedly by media. Without details, suspense has been built like a digital app.
Watch enough T.V. and it's hard to shake the sense of synchronized planning. The good guy/bad guy scenario of the average hour long cops and robbers episode.
Except for a minor blip now and then, Conservative events are completely scripted.
The angry man who had to be led away by the elbow....face twisted,he raged at young women for reporting about Senator Mike Duffy and the PMO. He accused the reporters of being B.S. liars.
It was a distraction ...ever so brief.
Like a meteor flashing across the sky.
How hard would it have been fir the Harper campaign to contrive that episode. To make it part of the daily news flush. To say what the candidate wanted said without him saying it.
O.K. I can hear you .... Evelyn you've been watching too much T.V.
Mais non, mes amies.
I have seen that done. It has been part of my experience.
So we watched the trade deal thingy nurtured and finally brought to fruition. Sort of.
To be precise, our minds have been conditioned to receive the latest contrivance.
Yesterday was the chosen moment.
Yet there is no more finality now than a week ago or the week before that. The deal is no closer to being implemented but success is already proclaimed.
Rival candidates predictably trot down the path set for them.
Cross the bridge and turn in the opposite direction. According to the analysts,the deal will reap substantial benefit for big operators and wipe out the little guys. The factory farm versus the family farm.
Some of us have been around long enough to remember hundreds of jobs lost and numbers of industries that vanished from Aurora after the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Government advised we had to re-think ourselves as service providers.
High tariffs continued in the pulp and paper industry because Americans had to have things their way. Who's going to stop them?
Government subsidies verboten in the deal as long as they were Canadian subsidies.
Today in Whitby ,the Clnservative candidate promised a billion dollars in grants and loans for the auto industry to re-tool to become not an auto industry, if his government is re-elected .
Sojnds like government subsidies to me.No tariff reduction there.
We've not seen the last of precisely contrived events in the campaign. The Prime Minister is In the driver's seat.
Media will respond to the cues set out along the way.
The rest of us are set to drift like plankton into the maw of the whale.
Therein lies the drama
When is being too clever not nearly so ?
When does the veneer wear paper thin ?
Maybe when the campaign is inordinately long.
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7 comments:
All of the countries, double digits of them, need to ratify that agreement. It is still work in progress.
And Mr Harper can create no villain here. One of his opponents favours the accord but wishes first to see all those pesky little details in small print. As he should. The other is still concerned about job losses and there may well be a lot of those in
several sectors .
I doubt very much if most of the negotiators from any off the countries really know and understand what it is that has so far been put on paper. But that's quite normal and to be expected with something of this size and complexity.
All 12 governments have to approve the "agreement" and that will never happen without many modifications and clarifications.
No one has a clue what the "final" document will say and there will be many escape clauses and extended time frames for the implementation of various aspects.
This is simply an agreement to keep on talking.
I think we can expect contrived incidents.
The consultant the Harper team brought in from Down Under has a reputation as a " Master of the Black Arts "
and that term was used by those who admire his work.
You can't blame just NAFTA for declining farming. I think it is also lack of interest in the younger generation.
Senate Leader McTurtle claims to have found
" troublesome parts " in the TPP
Those republicans do not like much about anything, do they ?
The auto people are not going to settle for any $1 Billion. The dairy sector is slated to receive more and
that's just the beginning before the details are known.Trying to buy off the others in the pretence of re-tooling for non-existent
jobs will not win Mr Harper those votes imho.
Mrs Clinton has said she does not support the TPP.
And, no, I have no idea what, if anything, that means.
It is just a comment.
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