MISSED OPPORTUNITY: CANADA'S RE-ENGAGEMENT WITH LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

Economic performance during the 1980s, dubbed "the lost decade," was dismal. One of the most significant failures was, and continues to be, in the area of employment creation - both quantity and quality (Lefeber 2003). The International Labour Organization (ILO) reports that during the 1990s "employment growth in modern, organized sectors has been generally stagnant, with upwards of 85% of all new jobs being created in the informal sector, involving microenterprises, farming and small-scale services, where wages, productivity and levels of social protection are generally much lower than in the formal sector. Temporary and part-time work has increased" (ILO 1999). The 2000s have not fared much better. Unemployment indicators have remained stubbornly high, around 10% for the 1996-2005 decade, and improvements in the last few years are being drastically reversed by the 2009 global recession, which is expected to throw an additional three million into the ranks of the unemployed (Comisión Económica para América Latina [CEPAL] 2009, 1, 14, Table A21; 2006, Table A22). When the state sector and formal private employment shrink, substantial numbers of vulnerable populations search for alternative economic strategies. As Portes and Hoffman have observed, "micro-entrepreneurialism, marginal self-employment, violent crime, and accelerating emigration have accompanied the new model as adaptive strategies to its economic consequences" (2003, 75). The region's annual GDP growth during the 1990s sat at only 2.9% (1.2% per capita) (CEPAL 2006, Table IA), and a spurt of growth during 2003-07 came to an abrupt end with an expected GDP drop of 1 .9% (3.1% per capita) during 2009 (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean [ECLAC] 2009, 1). Further, cyclical instability is being aggravated by structural vulnerabilities fed by a deregulated economic model. For example, a flood of inexpensive manufacturing products from Asia (particularly China), in a context of liberalized trade, has fuelled a wave of deindustrialization (Daudelin 2007). Given these statistics, it should not be surprising that, according to ECLAC, 34.1% of the region's people still lived in poverty in 2007, 12.6% in extreme poverty (ECLAC 2008, 5), with the current recession expected to substantially worsen these numbers. At any rate, by the end of the 1990s Canada had become an important hemispheric player, a strong advocate for the FTAA, and a respected defender of representative democracy in t