Need help viewing / downloading a PDF? Click Here
August 29, 2005
View / Download complete poll in PDF
NAFTA Part 2 : Panel Strongly Anti-U.S. for Being Hardline and Wrong, Anti-Ottawa for Weak Strategy and Thoughtless Provocation
 A BDO Dunwoody/Chamber Weekly CEO/Business Leader Poll by COMPAS in the Financial Post
As the softwood issue has been heating up, business leaders are becoming a challenging community for the federal government to win over.

On the merits of the issue, the panel of CEOs and business leaders is decidedly hawkish. United States governments are viewed as historically unreasonable on trade issues. The panel refutes the idea that Crown land stumpage fees are a subsidy, in contradistinction to National Post columnist Andrew Coyne and some other commentators.

Though almost unanimous in their anti-U.S. stance, panellists are cautious about what Canada should do. They express their strongest support for a formal probe of U.S.-subsidized corn and drawing up a list of U.S. goods on which to impose tariffs in retaliation, but even such support is far short of unanimous. In their volunteered opinions, panellists repeatedly warn of the dangers of being needlessly provocative.

Panellists are cautious because they do not want the American public to conclude that Canadians are anti-American and because they have little confidence in the Canadian government’s effectiveness. In the view of the panel, Ottawa is partly at fault because it has long taken for granted open access to U.S. markets and not built the alliances with Americans to protect it. Ottawa is also at fault because federal politicians have been needlessly thumbing their noses at the U.S. in the post-9/11 environment, for example when Hon. Pierre Pettigrew conspicuously attended Arafat’s gravesite.

Ministers David Emerson and Jim Peterson earn moderately high grades (63% and 61%) for, respectively, drawing up a list of goods for retaliation and cancelling a trade meeting in protest, but enthusiasm for these two ministers is neither passionate nor unanimous.

These are the key findings from the week’s web survey of CEOs and business leaders undertaken under the sponsorship of BDO Dunwoody LLP and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.
Category(ies)