Wednesday 29 June 2016

Is Cultural Insecurity "Trumping" Economics?

Over the past few months, I have started one Brexit post after another only to scrap it after it really didn't go anywhere. I scrapped things because I thought it had too much in common with a lot of my other posts; the 2014 Scottish Referendum, the prospect of Grexit in the summer of 2015, or commentary on monetary relations, or even Canadian institutions like the New West Partnership.

My take on Brexit seemed always to revolve around the same sets of tensions embedded in the neoclassical stages of integration. It may be that I need a fresh new analytical frame through which to look at every thing, but I have to admit the stages of integration are a great jump-off point for a lot of things.

Nevertheless, I scrapped every Brexit draft I wrote. Something was missing. Cultural insecurity. It hit me yesterday in a column by Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post who argued hat what is happening transcends the standard economic arguments put forward by politicians over the last 20 or 30 years to win votes. Indeed, dating at least to the 1992 campaign of Bill Clinton, maximizing the benefits of the post-Cold War shift toward liberal capitalism and liberal democracy has been pivotal to many election platforms. In 1992, the Clinton slogan was "It's the economy, stupid."

Monday 20 June 2016

The Softwood Lumber Soap Opera

The softwood lumber dispute is back!!!! In October 2015, the latest Softwood Lumber Agreement expired after essentially buying a little less than a decade of Canada-U.S. trade peace. Late last week, the two sides met in Ottawa to see if they could head off expensive trade litigation over the issue. They failed.

A new round of litigation will undoubtedly be coined Lumber V, meaning this is the fifth round of this long-running dispute. For those of you that haven't been following, the longevity of the softwood lumber dispute is shocking. Regardless of when you mark the start of each phase -- expiration of Agreements, negotiations, or initiation of litigation-- the intractability of this dispute can hardly fail to impress.

Lumber I, October 1982–April 1986
Lumber II, May 1986–December 1986
Lumber III, October 1991–April 1996
Lumber IV, April 2001–October 2006
Lumber V, October 2015-- Present


The outcome of last week's meeting should have been predictable to anyone that has followed this issue. It follows a depressingly familiar pattern. Much as a chef would draft a recipe for cookies, one can draft a recipe for this dispute. It goes something like this:

Redefining the Floor....Down

I was scrolling through some YouTube clips the other day and came across the great Seinfeld episode in which Frank Costanza invites Seinfeld...