A Canadian perspective on BHP's offer for Canada's Potash Corp

When his government decides to make decisions based on reports from the Conference Board of Canada, as he says he is waiting to do on this issue, he echoes past political leaders who extinguished the human flourishing in their jurisdictions by way of assuming that willing buyers and sellers can’t really judge their own best interests, but rather must operate only through select channels allowed by bureaucracy.

Today, beneath the technicalities of what a takeover of Potash Corp would mean for CanPotex (the provincial government sets resource royalties no matter what) and the latent xenophobia that occasionally rears its ugly head in the comment sections of newspaper websites, we face a simple choice.

Do we want to be part of a large and open economy with a free trade in resources and ideas, or do we want to fill in our own “Bass Strait” that isolates us from the mainland of the global economy?

Do we want to entertain a new management approach that is not necessarily better but certainly different and therefore enriches the range of ideas in our economy, or do we want to be parochial and hold them out?

Should local shareholders in PotashCorp have the choice of selling to the highest bidder on a global market and redeploy their capital as they see fit, or should their selling options instead be constrained to what is acceptable to the politics of relative isolationism?

If the ancient Tasmanians had been conscious of the world and the possibilities beyond their tiny island, one suspects their answers would have been obvious.

Unlike them, we have a choice. Let us hope that Premier Wall understands what trade and collaboration across borders and regions has done for human living standards throughout our history as a species.

Hopefully he’ll stop asking how being fully plugged into global commerce could possibly benefit Saskatchewan, and instead ask how it could not.