Here's what Trump gets right on trade

"We will no longer tolerate the audacious theft of intellectual property,” President Trump said Friday at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam. “We will confront the destructive practices of forcing businesses to surrender their technology to the state and forcing them into joint ventures in exchange for market access.” He was referring to big challenges that American businesses face in China.

Finally, he added a more universal problem, also present in China: “We will address the massive subsidizing of industries through colossal state-owned enterprises that put private competitors out of business."

On that last issue, the subsidizing of industry to put competitors out of business, Trump’s words resonate in our own corner of the world. For China’s state-owned enterprises might be more elaborate than Canada’s dairy cartel, but they operate on a similar protectionist principle. Both must be rooted out through free trade agreements, for everyone's good.

As the three North American partners renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, Canada’s quasi-Soviet dairy policy is just one of the many thorny issues making agreement more complicated.

NAFTA has generally been a good deal for all three countries. Businesses in each have either found markets in the other two, or been founded specifically to serve those markets. Thus, since NAFTA’s adoption, American exports to Mexico have more than quadrupled and exports to Canada have more than doubled. Imports from those countries have blossomed as well.