Figure 32-2 Selected Canadian Exports and Imports of Goods, 2017
goods; if the trade in services were included, trade growth would be even
larger.
(www.wto.orgSource: Adapted from World Trade Organization, .) International Trade Statistics, Table A1.
Figure 32-2 shows some data for Canadian trade in 2017. The bar chart
shows the value of Canadian exports and imports of goods in several
broad industry groupings. There are three important points to note from
the figure. First, international trade is important to Canada. In 2017,
Canada exported $550 billion and imported $574 billion in goods—if we
added trade in services, each of these values would be higher by about
$100 billion; each flow (exports and imports) amounts to about 32
percent of GDP. Second, exports and imports are roughly the same size,
so that the volume of trade is much larger than the balance of trade—the
value of exports minus the value of imports. Third, in most of the industry
groupings there are significant amounts of both imports and exports.
Such intra-industry trade will be discussed later in the chapter. Canada
does not just export resource products and import manufactured goods; it
also imports many resource products and exports many manufactured
goods.