“It’s funny, Barnaby,” Cecil says after spooning in some swanky porridge, a habit of talking with his mouth full I’ve tried gently chiding him away from, “to have lived long enough now to be able to witness history as it plays out.”
Patchy thoughts parceled out over our a.m. meetings down through the years. Playing regular games of conversational catch-up. An articulated idea half considered, less chewed over than the crunchy grains, nuts and legumes Cecil considers to be components of a breakfast cereal, spoken aloud mid-point, at best. Never introductory or conclusive.
“My understanding of history is that it plays out almost on a daily basis.”
“Generally speaking, of course,” Cecil agrees. “But I’m talking about specifics here. A specific history we were there for at the very beginning. At its inception. And now the consequences and upshots are unfolding in such a way that we can sit back and take a certain stock.”
“Stock?” I ask.
“Stock of the situation,” he says with a tone suggesting that he shouldn’t really have to elaborate. “Judge who was right, who was wrong. Did we steer the proper course, make the best choice? Or were we bamboozled from the get-go?”
It takes my good old friend Cecil a bit to warm up into a topic. Especially in the mornings. Especially the older we get. Everything takes that much longer to kick into gear. To iron out the kinks. For the fog to clear.
A second cup of coffee usually. Some blood-flow generating mastication. Depending on the day, a satisfying bowel movement.
“And what specific aspect of history are you referring to, Cecil?”
“The Free Trade Agreement, of course!” he splutters, literally, as the kids say, bits of creamy oats and assorted vegetative effluent indignation mist the air between us like celebratory confetti, which is why I’ve learned to maintain proper Covid distancing between us when sharing a meal with Cecil.
Granted, his exasperation is somewhat warranted.
Tariffs, free trade and acute nationalism have been all the rage for the past week or so since the latest stop-and-go threat from the President of the Erratic States (Cecil’s earlier phrase) to flatten our country economically took effect. Sort of. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe next month.
Stay tuned.
“Were the critics and opponents right, Barnaby?” Cecil poses to me.
The 1988 Free Trade federal election.
Be it resolved that Canada should go boldly into the 21st century as an integral economic partner of a muscular superpower intent on globalizing its neoliberal agenda or risk becoming a sniveling backwater desperately clinging to its woefully antiquated notion of nationhood.
Yea or nay?
Roughly. More or less.
Off the top of my head.
It has been nearly 40 years after all.
A settled debate. For better or ill. Better and ill.
Until now. Until recently.
With the ascent of bad faith actors.
“Well, Cecil,” I offered, “the critics certainly do seem closer to the right side of history at the moment, don’t they. Of course,” I add, waveringly, “perhaps the tight integration the agreement wrought has given us a stronger hand to play in all this.”
“You think?’
I shrug.
I am no economist.
Even my grasp of history could be considered suspect.
Truth is, until recent events, I hadn’t really put all that much thought into it. It is what it is. A fact of life. The status quo for almost four decades now. A hotly contested election showdown settled at the ballot box. The matter settled. Free traders triumphant. Into the future! 
Toward a glorious and prosperous future.
Let us not linger on our past differences.
“Seems to me with all the economic doomsaying I’m reading here, Barnaby, we don’t hold that strong a hand.”
We are captive to the capricious, whimsical flights of fancy of a historical illiterate. That much is true. Whether having not signed the agreement in the first place, not sold ourselves out, as one combatant suggested back then, would’ve made a lick of difference to our present circumstances, who can say with any degree of assuredness? The deal which we did agree to seems as flimsy as the paper we signed it on.
“If we ever held a strong hand, Cecil,” I say, “it was when we were dealing with honourable men. I hardly need tell you that is not the case we face now.”
Cecil sets the newspaper he’s holding down on the table in front of him, a symbol certainly of our vintage. “Sometimes I just like to get my hands dirty when I’m reading the news,” he’s told me on several occasions when I’ve pointed out his antediluvian ways.
“So we just throw up our hands and surrender?” he says, William Wallace defiant. “Is that what you’re telling me, Barnaby?”
I smile. There’s ferocity still in those old creaky bones.
“Not at all, Cecil,” I explain.
“Then what? What are you saying?”
My, oh my. Cecil’s certainly got his dander up. Cantankerous feistiness right around the corner when he orders a second cup of coffee.
“What I am saying is,” I say, “that maybe we put too much credence in something that was so easily violable, so easily discarded and ignored. Maybe we put too many of our eggs in one basket. Eggs now being such a precious commodity.”
Cecil sits back in his chair, still giving me a hard stare, not sure of my meaning or maybe even my allegiance.
“We did,” I continue, “sign on to the notion of the free flow of capital above all, after all. Threw our lot in with the merciless logic of the free market, yes? Manufacture where it’s cheap. Sell where the deeper pockets are.”
Cecil remains steadfast in his look of apparent leeriness toward my thinking, such as it is, riffing on notions, admittedly, some half-baked, and perhaps still, my patriotic commitments.
Cecil turns his severe attention from me to the last bits in his breakfast bowl, eating as if it could be his last meal, as if he’s a grunt stationed on the Western Front, preparing to go over the top.
“There always was an opt-out clause in the agreement, wasn’t there?” I offer up in an attempt to normalize at least some aspect of these abnormal times. “Six months, wasn’t it? The process is just being fast-tracked, I guess.”
“So we were asking for it, is what you’re saying,” Cecil aerosols out bits of morsels toward me again, and sets his bowl down on the table in front of him with almost a slam. Most certainly a thunk.
“No, Cecil,” I reply calmly. “I guess what I’m saying is that perhaps we should’ve costed out the worst-case scenario during the negotiations. Maybe had a Plan B in our back pocket. A Break Glass in Case of Emergency alternative.”
This seems to settle Cecil down somewhat. He sits back in his chair, contemplative, brashly tonguing out bits of his meal from between his teeth.
“I think I liked it better,” he says finally, “when most Americans couldn’t locate us on a map.”
Truer words have not been spoken.
At least, so far this morning.
Slapping his hands down on the armrests, Cecil lifts himself from his chair with the groaned exhalations of a man half his age. He makes his way stiffly toward the counter where, I’m assuming, a second cup of coffee will be ordered.
The fight, obviously, we’ve only just begun.