Hockey Gear Is the Focus of a Tariff Cut in Canada

[doniceage]

OTTAWA — Take a walk down an aisle at Pro Hockey Life, an emporium of the Canadian national sport here on the capital’s southern fringe, and a customer comes away with a decidedly non-Canadian feel. Almost every pad, mask, stick and skate is made elsewhere — mostly in Asia, often by foreign-owned manufacturers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/bu...nada.html?_r=0

[fleemur12]

Another example of Global corporations doing what they do best. Maximizing profits with little regard for their workers or the long-term stability of consumers. US manufacturing jobs have practically disappeared which began in the 1980s. Now mega-stores have replaced most locally owned businesses. The big, multinational corporations that own these stores have cornered the market by offering the lowest prices around. They still turn a profit because they have access to a huge pool of poor foreign workers that they can exploit by only providing substance pay and little or no benefits. Local companies cannot even compete with that by paying minimum-wage to their workers, and they must close shop.

Consumers enjoy the luxury of saving money by paying the lowest prices on practically all retail items, all while shopping under one roof. It's the main tenant of consumerism and capitalism. But by only frequenting these stores owned by multinationals, they're essentially supporting the degradation of their own society. Jobs are transferred offshore, local jobs are lost, money is no longer invested in the local economy and the middle class becomes the lower class.