Federal Government Launches Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor
Initiative
At an official ceremony held at the Port of
Vancouver on October 16, Prime Minister Steven Harper officially launched the
Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor Initiative. The Initiative is a four-year programme to upgrade and expand the transportation
infrastructure on the West Coast in order to capture a larger share of the
shipping market for Canadian businesses. The previous Liberal government had
introduced the Pacific Gateway Act (Bill C-68) on October 21, 2005, but the
defeat of the Martin government on November 14, 2005 brought a temporary halt
to the programme.
Harper announced 12 separate infrastructure,
transportation technology and border security projects. All major commercial
ports, from Rupert to Roberts Bank will see major expansions and improvements.
Bridges and roads linking the ports to the national and trans-national highway systems
will be built or upgraded. There will be further twinning of the Trans-Canada
Highway in Banff National Park. A new container security screening facility
will be installed at the Port of Prince Rupert. And finally, a high-tech
traffic management system will be developed for the Lower Mainland that will
move containers into and out of port terminals faster and more efficiently.
The federal government has committed $591
million to these projects but this is only the tip of the iceberg. The B.C.
provincial government is planning to invest $12.1 billion in new infrastructure
over the next three years. The City of Vancouver, the Vancouver International
Airport Authority, the Port Authority of Vancouver, and other municipal
governments and quasi-government organizations have their own spending plans
too. The private sector has committed over $3 billion to Gateway and
Corridor-related capital investment between 2004 and 2010. As a result of these
improvements, total container throughput capacity at the Pacific ports is
projected to rise from 2 million units a year today to 7 million by 2020. This
would boost Canada's share of the West Coast container market to 14 percent and
increase the volume of U.S. container traffic passing through Canada.
The governments and businesses would like to
attract a higher volume of container traffic from the United States passing
through Canada for destinations in China, Japan, South Korea, India and
Indonesia, as well as to increase the volume of container traffic from Asia
passing through Canada on to destinations in the United States. Harper's vision
is that: "Canada should be the crossroads between the massive economy of
the United States and the burgeoning economies of Asia." He pointed out
that Canada's west coast ports have a geographic advantage over the U.S. ports
that they compete against for container business because our ports are much
closer to the main commercial ports of Asia than most of the American ports. In
spite of this advantage, and the huge cost savings it represents for shippers,
Harper bemoaned the fact that Canada only handles 9 percent of West Coast
container traffic and only 9 percent of Canada's container traffic serves U.S.
markets.
Steven Harper is selling the Asia-Pacific
Gateway and Corridor Initiative as a project that will increase Canada's
competitiveness in the global market and lead to more business opportunities
and jobs for British Columbians and all Canadians. However, the aim of the
gateway and corridor initiative is not the creation of jobs. Rather, it is the
making of maximum profits for the shipping businesses. The infrastructure
projects will undoubtedly create a lot of short-term jobs in the construction
industry, but this construction boom will be short-lived like the others before
it.
Overall, the Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor
Initiative will increase the dependence of
the economies of British Columbia and Canada on U.S. and Asian markets
rather than contribute to the development of a self-reliant economy. In this
respect, the Harper government is following the same policies as all preceding
governments despite its admission in its first budget that Canada's dependence
on the United States is one of the main "risks" and
"uncertainties" for the Canadian economy.
Historically, when the U.S. economy goes into
a slump, the Canadian economy invariably follows in its wake. Every time the
U.S. housing market goes down, the
forestry industry in B.C. goes into crisis and thousands of forestry workers
are laid off. The same thing happens to the auto and other manufacturing
sectors in Ontario and Quebec. More recently, the increasing dependence of B.C. on trade with major Asian economies has
made the B.C. economy more sensitive than ever to slumps in these countries, as
occurred during the Asian economic crisis in 1997.
Increasing Canada's global competitiveness is
a policy of creating the most favourable conditions
for the monopoly capitalists to seek maximum profits through the exploitation
of the Canadian people and the people of other countries. It has nothing to do
with building any lasting prosperity or economic security. It is based on
preserving the capitalist system, which suffers from recurring crises of
overproduction, and one consequence of this policy is to make the Canadian
economy even more vulnerable to these ups and downs of the world capitalist
market.