The Harper government made a huge effort to diversify Canadian export markets, in part to reduce our over-dependence on the US market. We signed new trade agreements with 39 countries, moving Canada from 6 to 45 free trade agreements between 2006-2015. That included free trade with most of Europe and Asia through CETA and TPP. This helped marginally to diversify our exports away from the US, but then the Liberal government oversaw a huge increase in our dependence on the US during the Lost Decade. While they were busy hammering our resource industries, the “progressive” Liberal trade agenda was focussed on promoting DEI and ESG language in annexes to existing agreements, rather than hard nosed commercial negotiations and market expansion. Now we’re paying the price. The single biggest thing Canada could do to diversify our exports and improve our balance of trade would be to build coastal oil and gas pipelines and LNG terminals, moving our energy to fungible global commodity markets. That would increase our exports to the world by tens of billions of dollars. But instead of doing that hard work, it’s a lot easier to send Ministers to an endless circuit of summits and conferences to virtue signal with cliché talking points about our “progressive” trade agenda. This chart is what that approach has given us: much more dependence on an unreliable, protectionist American market.