A year after the free trade agreement came into effect, all of the disasters foretold by the critics have indeed come to pass. Well, not all. The Great Lakes have yet to be diverted to the previously arid midwestern states, medicare has not been dismantled, and there's still no sign of those Star Wars installations in the North Mel Hurtig insisted were an implicit part of the agreement.

But surely you don't think they meant any of that, do you? That was just for effect: what you might call political license. Their real message all along was that free trade would be an economic disaster. And sure enough, the economy has started to slow, there have indeed been widespread layoffs, the current account has sunk ever deeper into deficit.

Of course, the economy did not turn in all that bad a performance in 1989. Real growth of about 2%; net new job creation in the region of 250,000; housing starts also above the 200,000 mark; a 28% increase in manufacturing investment - not boom times, perhaps, but hardly disaster material. But all you have to do is say how much better things would have been without free trade, and you have an essentially irrefutable argument.

To show that free trade has actually done us harm is a little trickier. The argument rests on two foundations. One, everything bad that has happened since Jan. 1, 1989, is because of free trade. Two, everything that has happened since Jan. 1, 1989, has been bad. There isn't much more to it than that.

The first is the classic post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: That Thing B comes after Thing A is not enough to prove Thing B was caused by Thing A. You have to show that.

This is especially so if you are not yet even post hoc. The case would be dubious enough after free trade was fully in place. But it is simply tiresome to have to deal with this one year into a 10-year period of implementation.

The second adds flexibility. Not only can all bad news be blamed on free trade, but good news can be presented as if it were bad news. Thus, a rise in foreign investment is announced as a ''cost'' of free trade. Whether or not free trade is responsible, it's not a given that foreign investment is a bad thing.

Failing any convenient bad news, whatever might be unpleasant about the status quo can always be reinvented as bad news - and blamed on free trade. Follow these instructions: A. Set impossibly high standard of what ought to have happened under free trade - for example, job growth of 500,000 per year, or all U.S. companies instantly drop trade remedy suits. B. Identify status quo: ''only'' 250,000 jobs created in year one; U.S. firms do not go away. C. Compare impossibly high standard (A) to status quo (B). D. Blame free trade.

We are dealing here, not with the Big Lie, but with a new and more daring variant: the Preposterously Weak Argument. By disregarding logic and facts so flagrantly, the suggestion is left that logic and facts don't matter.

Take the argument over layoffs. The Council of Canadians and the Canadian Labor Congress now claim free trade is responsible for the layoff of 70,000 workers. First point: This is not a net figure. In net terms, it is indisputible that employment has grown this year by more than 200,000 jobs.

Second point: This is not a large figure. Each year, according to Statistics Canada, about 4.5 million Canadians change jobs: A little more than 4 million lose or leave their jobs, and a little more than that take new jobs. To create 70,000 jobs takes about five days.

Free trade was supposed to destroy jobs in some sectors of the economy, to free resources to create better jobs in other sectors. Common sense would tell us that in a dynamic economy, jobs will be gained and jobs will be lost, but as long as the jobs gained are either greater in number or higher paying than the jobs lost, we come out ahead. The implication of the critics' complaint is, apparently, that no jobs should ever be lost.

But mostly, this is not a very honest figure. The CLC's methodology is simply to count up the toll from every plant closing they can find, and attribute them all to free trade. This works well at first, but can be hazardous if anyone bothers to check your figures. As it happens, someone has. For instance:

Kraft laid off 290 employees from its Montreal plant last December. The Council of Canadians instantly blamed free trade. As it turned out, this was a regular seasonal layoff, and everyone was back at work in two to three weeks. Whoops.

Molson and Carling O'Keefe merged, cutting 1,400 jobs. This also shows up in the figures. How is this related to free trade, since beer was specifically excluded from the FTA? Over to you, Council of Canadians.

I could cite examples of Canadian and American companies that expanded production and took on workers in Canada because of free trade. I could mention Bachan Aerospace, which closed its Detroit plant, shifted the work to its Windsor subsidiary, and changed its name to Windsor Aerospace. Or Quebec furniture maker Shermag, which first bought a factory in Massachusetts in anticipation of free trade, then closed it and moved production to its Quebec plants.

But it's very difficult and probably foolish to attribute specific jobs lost or jobs gained, plants closed or opened, to any one factor. To show causation relies on ''other things being equal'' and other things usually are not equal.

The other major economic ''consequence'' of free trade is the deterioration of the trade balance. The current account is headed for a deficit of $20 billion this year, twice last year's figure. This, declare some of the critics, is because of the removal of our protective barriers.

First, we haven't removed our protective barriers yet. We've only reduced them a tenth. Second, whether the trade balance is in surplus or deficit is not economically significant. The only thing foreigners get out of a trade surplus with Canada is C$, which are useless to them except to invest in Canada or to buy Canadian goods.

Third, the trade balance is not determined by trade policy. Tariffs and quotas determine how open an economy is to trade. They say nothing at all about whether that traded sector will be in balance or not. The trade balance is a macroeconomic phenomenon, determined by fiscal and monetary conditions, by aggregate demand and exchange rates - not tariffs.

Indeed, so flimsy is the tariff-trade balance link that even some of the critics find it embarrassing. But that has only left them leaning on an even weaker reed: Free trade is driving Canadian macroeconomic policy. This is the fabled ''secret protocol'' - a side agreement to the FTA that we would tighten monetary policy to drive up the C$, now over US86 cents.

A year ago Hurtig was predicting free trade would sink the C$ to US78 cents, but never mind. What is the evidence of this conspiracy? ''How else do you explain that Canadian interest rates have stayed four points above American interest rates,'' says Liberal trade critic Lloyd Axworthy. No, but what evidence is there? ''Unfortunately, we can't pin it down.'' I guess not.

There's just one flaw in this argument: Money isn't tight. It's loose, and getting looser. The broad money measure M2, along with every other indicator of household and business credit, is growing in double digits. A clue that this is the case is found in the trade figures. Slackening exports aren't so much responsible - though sagging U.S. demand has taken its toll. It's more that imports have surged. That's an indication of too much domestic demand, not too little.

The root of the problem, however, lies in fiscal policy. The reason we have a current account deficit is that we have a capital account surplus - that is, a net inflow of capital. Foreigners can only lend us the dollars they earn from trading with us. And the reason we need that inflow is that we are investing more than we are saving. And the reason we aren't saving enough is, in part, large public sector deficits, which are negative savings.

Perhaps this, too, can be blamed on free trade. Now, I've always been with Hurtig on the evils of excessive foreign indebtedness. But until now I've never quite been able to follow what this had to do with free trade. The implication seemed to be that if those foreigners would just stop lending to us, the debt problem would disappear. But perhaps what he really meant was that there was a secret protocol to keep the deficit high. If, on investigation, this proves to be true, then I am against the free trade deal.