Trade has risks

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   By Cow Man (Murray Harris, Guest Blogger)

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Inhabiting Southern Ontario upon discovery by the French in 1650, was the Neutral Confederacy. The Neutral were a trading Confederacy that had the “chert supply cartel” (here) for the making of arrowheads and spears, trading it with neighbouring Confederacies. Subsequently the Haudenosaunee from Michigan, the anti supply management forces, attacked the Neutrals and annihilated them, seizing their territory, and chert production, with the surviving Neutrals assimilating with the Onondaga south of Lake Erie. No quota exchanged hands. Foreboding? (Here)

Canada has and always will be a trading Nation. Beaver pelts for guns, axe heads and metal pots. Lumber for buildings, ships, barrel staves, and fuel, exchanged for fabric, glass and cookware, trade maturing to wheat for machinery to make foundry metals and harvesters.

Canada’s international trade also had negative ramifications. European traders brought smallpox, measles, leptospirosis and flu to North America and the viruses tore through the continent, killing an estimated 90% of Native Americans.

In return, the lusting Europeans received syphilis. (Here)

Trade can cause problems that the resulting revenue can’t fix.

Most significantly are the environmental impacts. Near extinction of a tree species due to a disease brought to us through trade, Dutch Elm Disease. (Here)

Most livestock farms had Elms as a prevalent tree along fence rows and strategically positioned in pasture fields. By the 1960’s Dutch Elm disease, that had entered Canada from the UK, rampaged through Ontario killing these huge trees that spread 30 metre canopies, providing shade, protection from insects, and shelter from rain. Cattle don’t carry umbrellas, or SPF60.

Our countryside was scarred by 1000s of 25 metre tall skeletons of former arboreta grandeur, to the point where the Government paid farmers $10 per tree to cut them down and remove the stumps.

The Elm infestation had been preceded by the Norwegian Saw Fly that arrived in Canada in the 1930’s, and is still cyclically prevalent. What we traded to expose our conifers has not been documented. (Here)

This century we traded for the Emerald Ash Borer, arriving in Southern Ontario in 2002, concealed in shipping containers from east Asia. Hundreds of thousands of trees have been decimated in Ontario in the last decade. Cost of removal to protect buildings, power infrastructure, and lives, is in the 100s of millions of dollars. It is probably impossible to accurately state the negative economic impact of that trade deal. A neighbour had a low bid of $11,000 to remove two Ash killed by the emerald invader.

And what value do we put on the risk of trade to our waters? Thought to have entered the Great Lakes through the ballast of trading ships, Lamprey eels attach to the bodies of our trout and salmon and suck their blood. Is there any sight more disturbing than seeing a Lake trout with a pair of lamprey eels piecing its flanks? The lamprey eel has been held at bay through treating our rivers to kill the larvae. A 1955 joint treaty between US and Canada resulted a 90% reduction of these predators, that clearly demonstrate the risk of trade. Is a Lamprey Eel an appropriate logo for Lake America? (Here)

Enhancing your dinner menu to complement your lamprey eel entree, we tempt your palate with a delectable zebra mussel appetizer.

Now sourced in our Great Lakes, native to the Black and Caspian seas in southeastern Europe, zebra mussels entered our hemisphere in the 1980’s from the ballast water discharge from trading ships. (Here)

This all pales in comparison to trading our principles and our sovereignty. We have all heard the adage of the Ogre and the Maiden. “Will you trade your principles for $1,000, he states? Rejected! For $100,000? Rejected! Will you accompany me for $1,000,000? Maybe! Well now we know what you are, all we have to do is negotiate the price, the Ogre stated.”

What will Canada’s price be for our principles and sovereignty be to trade with Orange Julius?

As John Turner stated to PM Mulroney in 1988 about NAFTA:

“We built a country east and west and north. We built it on an infrastructure that deliberately resisted the continental pressure of the United States. For 120 years we’ve done it. With one signature of a pen, you’ve reversed that, thrown us into the north-south influence of the United States and will reduce us…to a colony of the United States, because when the economic levers go, the political independence is sure to follow”.

“I believe that Canadians are not going to vote for Brian Mulroney, a man who would be governor of a 51st state. They are going to vote for John Turner, a man who wants to be Prime Minister of Canada“. (Here)

Orange Julius was not the first politician to slight a Canadian PM as “Governor”.

The risk of trade is not only to our sovereignty.

About the Blogger: Murray Harris (who posts as Cow man) is a 40-year dairy farmer having developed his Burnview Holstein herd to one of Canada’s highest production herds. Community activist and Charter Member of Burlington’s Sustainable Development Committee, he has held positions on several Agricultural Committees and Conservation Halton. Married to his Trophy wife of 52 years, he’s a father of two, grandfather of three and continues to serve the community as a school bus driver.

Source: https://www.greaterfool.ca/2026/09/22/trade-has-risks/