Are Trade Imbalances Good for Canada?

And what if they make our trading partners sad?

A recent Free Press piece offered the provocative argument that decades of free trade policies - and the economic ideologies that spawned them - were largely a mistake. A mistake, it must be noted, that permanently crippled the careers and lives of millions of Americans. The article quotes a handful of long-time “globalist skeptics” claiming that many economists have long known how much damage free trade was doing to American workers, but were often too frightened to say anything about it.

One popular argument for free trade was that offshoring factory work to developing nations (like China in the 1990’s) would introduce cheap consumer goods and free up American workers for higher-paying and more sophisticated and productive work. The cheap consumer goods certainly arrived, but that was small comfort for countless industrial regions throughout the U.S. heartland that never recovered when those “more productive” jobs failed to materialize.

All of which left me wondering about Canada’s experience. In hindsight, has free trade damaged our economy, too? And as a related question, have trade deficits - or surpluses, for that matter - caused us more harm than good?

To try to answer that first question, I pulled data representing the total annual dollar values of imported merchandise since 1988,¹ and unemployment numbers for all provinces and Canada as a whole for the same period. I then looked for correlations between trends in annual imports and unemployment. I figured that unemployment was where the risks of free trade should - as happened in the U.S. - make themselves known. I ignored the COVID years (2020-2021) because they were just too strange to be helpful.

In fact, there was a strong negative correlation (𝑟 ≈ −0.83). In other words, higher imports are, over time, associated with lower unemployment. This, of course, doesn’t prove that imports caused lower unemployment. And there are plenty of important economic metrics where Canada has deeply under performed the U.S. through these years. But it does suggest the intriguing possibility that our outcomes were largely decoupled from those of our largest trading partner.

Why might that be? Perhaps it’s because, for Canada, rising imports signal economic growth - which boosts labor demand and lowers unemployment. Imports, in the Canadian context, often support export industries. Many imports are intermediate goods used for exports. Rising import numbers can thus support domestic production and employment in sectors like Ontario’s auto industry or Alberta’s oil and gas.

We can see a bit of this in our historical balance of payments numbers. Through all the months between January 1997 and March 2025, Canada averaged a trade surplus of $1.27 billion even though, through that time, we also averaged a $1.16 billion trade deficit with China.² Who picked up the slack? You guessed it: the U.S., with whom, on average, we enjoyed a monthly trade surplus of $5.69 billion.

As I’ve written before, every macroeconomic event produces both winners and losers. Like my friend who had a nice business selling men’s neckties locally. Well at least until the early nineties when cheap Asian imports put him out of business.

Multiply that experience by many thousands and you’ll draw some depressing conclusions. But the big picture suggests that, when it comes to Canada, the winners outnumbered the losers.

The thing is though, while it’s nice to be winners, we can’t be sure this will continue indefinitely. March 2025 exports to the U.S. are down by $5.6 billion from just two months earlier. That’s a drop of nine percent.

The party may be over.

1. I had to incorporate this dataset for years prior to 1999.

2. Although, if you only look at the months since January 2008, the average was actually $1.53 billion