Anyone who thinks that the quality of goods on offer in Canada improved with open trade clearly has never bought anything made in China, so that argument is just bogus.  Yes, autarky would cause more inflation, but frankly we need it to avoid deflation in the next recession. Don't forget that artificial intelligence and tech in general is making manufacturing more efficient all the time, which will increasingly offset any loss of jobs from reduced exports. You can't have it both ways: either we use more labor by doing things less efficiently for small batches for this country only or we are efficient enough not to need the export generated jobs.