COLOMBIA is a country plagued by violence, political instability and one of the world's most brutally lucrative illegal drug industries. Its democratically elected president, Alvaro Uribe, is a controversial figure who has been accused of having links to right-wing militias fighting left-wing militias and terrorist organizations.
The country is clearly a mess, perhaps the biggest mess in all of Latin America today, but Prime Minister Stephen Harper thinks Canada should negotiate a free trade deal with it. Mr. Harper is right.
The prime minister, who was in Colombia this week as part of a Latin American tour, argues that if we want to encourage that country to improve its human rights record and the living conditions of its long-suffering population, we need to provide it with an opportunity to change the base of its economy to something more diverse and less harmful than providing cocaine to Canadian cities .
We need to offer Colombians a chance for better lives in a free-market democracy that would undermine the influence of leftist terrorists and drug traffickers who have been tearing its social fabric apart for decades. That's what free trade can help to do by opening new markets to legitimate Colombian businesses and to Canadian businesses as well.
Curiously, the opposition to Mr. Harper's initiative has been passionate on the part of the Canadian left, with the NDP and the trade unions condemning it as a threat to Canadian jobs. Even more curiously, that opposition is shared by the Colombian left and trade unions, who condemn it as a threat to Colombian jobs. How it could be both is a bit of a puzzle, but no more confusing than most arguments against free trade.
In the Canadian experience, free trade has worked well wherever it has been tried. In the international experience, more open trade relations with troubled countries have often resulted in better social and economic conditions for people living under politically repressive regimes, even when better times don't necessarily mean freer times.
The example of China is useful. The China trade has been the mother lode for Western commerce since the days of Marco Polo, but it has only been in the last 30 years that it has really opened. That has meant more prosperous lives for both Chinese and Canadians, but as the shameful treatment of Canadian citizens such as Huseyin Celil -- arbitrarily jailed on terrorism charges in China this year -- proves, it has done nothing to improve China's human rights record.
Hardly anyone, however, argues that we should end trade with China. Why then, should we refuse to trade with Colombia? The Canadian market, the Canadian international presence is far too small to catch Beijing's attention in any serious way or influence Chinese policy. Colombia, on the other hand, is a much smaller nation, with a population of about the same size as Canada's. It is a country in which Canadian trade and Canadian traditions and influence could actually make a difference. Who could argue against that?
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