One morning 10 years ago, my brother lost his long-time job when the owners of the Scarborough electronic parts factory where he worked announced it was closing the plant and moving its operations to Chicago.

Soon after, his company shut down two other factories in Oakville, tossing 400 employees out of work. The jobs were shifted to the U.S. and Mexico.

A bit later, the Markham electronics company where my niece had worked also closed its doors. It, too, moved its jobs outside of Canada.

The owners never admitted it, but workers were convinced a major reason why the companies closed the Ontario plants was the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement reached in 1987 under former prime minister Brian Mulroney.

The deal, which was the focal point of the 1988 federal election, eliminated import tariffs on most products, resulting in many profit-hungry companies closing plants here and moving the jobs to cheap-labour areas.

I was reminded of those lost jobs when I read an article in the Star about a huge event last week for Mulroney at the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the trade deal.

For a full hour, Mulroney regaled the 700 adoring fans in attendance with tales of how he rescued the trade deal, turning it into “the greatest in the history of the world.”

It was vintage Mulroney — charming, confident, boastful.

Mulroney is right when he says the deal radically reshaped this country’s economy. But it hasn’t been all for the best, as he and free-trade champions, few of whom I bet have ever worked a day on a factory floor, like to brag.

In fact, the agreement shattered the dreams of hundreds of thousands of workers, many of them in the industrial heartland of Ontario, who saw their well-paid, middle-class jobs vanish in the months and years after the deal was signed.

Those lost jobs weren’t confined just to assembly-line workers. Accountants, salespeople, receptionists, IT and warehouse workers also lost their jobs when factories shut down.

And the impact is still being felt. Remember just a generation ago when a young person could walk down any street in most towns and quickly find a good factory job? That never happens now; those jobs are gone forever.

Beyond the happy-talk about how the trade deal made us more confident on the world stage, the reality is that high world oil prices have had more positive impact on our economy than the trade agreement.

“The promise that free trade would induce more trade, productivity growth and higher incomes is not remotely supported by the aggregate economic data,” Jim Stanford, a respected Canadian Auto Workers economist, wrote in a recent article for the Progressive Economics Forum.

Stanford is one of those people pro-deal supporters would label a “free-trade denier,” a slur used by Trade Minister Ed Fast to describe Canadians who don’t enthusiastically back such agreements.

“It’s reasonable to assert that the typical Canadian is no better off” than before the Canada-U.S. deal, Stanford said.

Stanford cited government statistics showing that our exports to the U.S. are at the same percentage level as in the mid-1980s, that our trade deficit is the highest ever, that our productivity has fallen in comparison with the U.S and that income levels of most Canadians in real terms are unchanged.

“It is not the ‘free-trade deniers’ that inhabit a fantasy world,” he adds. “No matter how loudly Trade Minister Fast asserts that only an economic illiterate would dare to question the virtues of free trade, it’s his side of the debate that relies on faith, rather than fact.”

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Maybe the next time the Rotman School stages a celebration of the free-trade deal, the organizers will invite Stanford as well as Mulroney. Better still, they should invite a few workers who lost their jobs in the wake of the deal.

But that’s unlikely to happen because no one, especially Mulroney, wants a hard dose of reality to spoil a celebration.

Bob Hepburn’s column appears Thursday. bhepburn@thestar.ca .

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