Free Trade
While Galen Weston expressed personal support for free trade with the United States, the signing of an agreement in 1988 resulted in another re-evaluation of his company’s asset mix. Through the late 1980s and 1990s, businesses that included biscuit and ice cream making, bathroom tissue manufacturing, milling, sugar refining and chocolate bar makings, were divested as domestic industries struggled to remain competitive:
“The historic east-west dynamics of the Canadian economy, as well as our small and scattered population, created structural inefficiencies in everything we did. And so, in response to free trade, we had to become competitive on our manufacturing side, which meant staying with fewer product categories and only those that could succeed on the North American scale. We restructured, we consolidated, and we did what had to be done for our long-term survival.”
Read more about this topic: Galen Weston
Famous quotes containing the words free and/or trade:
“People named John and Mary never divorce. For better or for worse, in madness and in saneness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep, and commit mayhem, but they are not free to divorce. Tom, Dick, and Harry can go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary.”
—John Cheever (1912–1982)
“The profession of magician, is one of the most perilous and arduous specialisations of the imagination. On the one hand there is the hostility of God and the police to be guarded against; on the other it is as difficult as music, as deep as poetry, as ingenious as stage-craft, as nervous as the manufacture of high explosives, and as delicate as the trade in narcotics.”
—William Bolitho (1890–1930)