Former Manitoba MLA Calls for More Diversified Agricultural Trade and Reduced Reliance on U.S. Imports

A former Manitoba Liberal leader suggests, to protect Canada from the effects of the Trump administration's brewing trade war, we need to be looking to other markets for our products and replacing U.S. imports with products made in Canada. News over the past several months has been dominated by coverage of a brewing trade war involving the United States and more than 75 of its trading partners, including Canada and Mexico.

Dr. Jon Gerrard, a former MLA, Manitoba Liberal leader, federal MP and Minister for Science, Research and Development and Western Economic Diversification, observes the constantly changing, on again off again U.S. tariffs are making it very difficult for companies to plan.

Clip-Dr. Jon Gerrard-Former Manitoba Liberal Leader:

In that context I believe that there's two areas where we need to focus.One is working with individuals, companies, people in the United States to try and persuade Trump that the direction things are going is not a good one and we should be returning back to a situation where we have no or very low tariffs on agricultural products going back and forth across the border.

The second thing is that we need to think about where we are at the moment and imagine what our economy would be like if we were less reliant on the United States.There's been a lot of talk about improving our markets outside the United States.I would suggest, as an example, that we should improve relations with India because they've got 1.4 billion people.

There's a potential big market for food in India and I think we should be working with countries like India, and not just India, many countries around the world where there's a potential for markets for our food.Second, we should be looking at, when we grow the economy here, how we replace what we're now importing from the United States.We should be doing things and making products and producing more needs right here in Canada.

Dr. Gerrard suggests there's a lot of good examples of potential products that we could be producing in Canada, including a number in agriculture.
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