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Michael Hlinka: Foreign Manufacturers Legal Accountability Act is mean-spirited legislation

Money Talks is a business column from CBC radio.

By Michael Hlinka, CBC business columnist.

Next week, a critically important vote will happen that could have a far-reaching impact on Canadian business interests. 

If you haven't heard of the Foreign Manufacturers Legal Accountability Act, it's not because you're ill-informed. Rather, it's because this piece of legislation - which could have a negative impact on all sorts of Canadians - won't be voted on in our Parliament. 

The vote will take place in the U.S. House of Representatives, when it considers whether to ban imports from companies that do not have an American agent, or possibly an American office. Nobody really seems to know for sure what the bill would mean in practice.

In order to make sense of this piece of legislation, we have to go back in time a bit, to 2006.  Because of extensive damage caused by hurricanes, the United States faced a drywall shortage. It met that shortage by importing drywall from mainland China - enough to build 340,000 homes, according to a estimate from the Associated Press.
 
Not long after, however, complaints from homeowners started to trickle in. The drywall in their homes started to smell like rotten eggs. In addition, there were health issues:  respiratory infections, sinus problems and nosebleeds.
 
Should these complaints be addressed? Of course. 
 
But not only is this bill overkill, it wouldn't have stopped the drywall from being imported in the first place.

If you look at the provisions of the Foreign Manufacturers Legal Accountability Act, you quickly see that this is an extension of the "Buy American" mania that the U.S. government has embraced since the 2008 election. The American economy continues to stagnate. Even after the dollar's plummet, U.S. manufacturing can't get out of its own way. This piece of legislation will greatly disadvantage all the other countries that currently export to the United States. That is its clear intent.   
 
By the way, this isn't just Michael Hlinka's opinion. The European Union's ambassador to the United States has publicly warned that this could spark a trade war and be one more obstacle to a global economic recovery. And if it's bad for Europe, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize that it could be devastating for Canadian interests.
 
It's mean-spirited legislation. It's legislation that is completely counter to the spirit of NAFTA and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs.
 
And it's legislation that is almost certain to pass, given that all of the voters themselves stand for re-election in fewer than eight weeks time.

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