U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy
As Toronto Star columnist Tim Harper points out, U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy (D-5) is far from a household name in Canada. But Murphy woke up Friday morning to find that Harper, and in turn many other Canadians, are not too pleased with him.
“This morning I learn that Canadians are VERY unhappy with me,” Murphy tweeted from his ChrisMurphyCT account, directing his followers to Harper’s latest column in The Star.
What could Murphy, a two-term Congressman who is bidding for the Democratic nod to run for the U.S. Senate seat that Sen. Joe Lieberman will vacate next year, have done to anger America’s neighbors to the north?
Murphy chairs the Buy America caucus in the House, and has, as Harper puts it, “been beating the protectionist drum for years.”
Harper called Murphy “one of the prime suspects behind the latest cross-border trade squabble.”
Earlier this month Murphy sent a letter to President Barack Obama encouraging him to close the loopholes in Buy America and help keep jobs in the U.S. in his jobs act bill.
“Our past failures to adopt strong Buy American provisions have cost countless American manufacturing jobs,’’ Murphy said in the letter.
But what angers Harper and Canadians is that while their nation may not be Murphy’s target, his plan to keep jobs in America would be costly to Canada.
“… shut Canada out of any part of close to $80 billion of infrastructure work south of the border. Again,” Harper wrote in his column. “It’s a strange position to take for a representative of a state that has a $12 million per day trade relationship with Canada, a relationship that directly sustains 100,100 jobs in his state.”
The Congressman’s office told Harper that Murphy wasn’t specifically targeting any country with his letter, and was simply trying to keep jobs in the U.S.
But, Harper wrote, this was “a text book example of how Canada routinely gets sideswiped when the U.S. is targeting someone else.”