Looking from every angle
Canada can claim at least partial success of progressive agenda in USMCA
Was Canada’s pursuit of a “progressive” trade agenda a help or a hindrance during the marathon negotiations with the U.S. and Mexico on a new continental free trade pact? According to Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, it was little more than “politically correct posturing” that served only to weaken Canada’s negotiating position.
But according to Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, it was a strategy that paid off with “a very progressive trade agreement” aimed at ensuring the benefits of trade-fuelled economic growth are more equitably shared among citizens in the three countries.
To determine which of those competing claims is nearest to the truth, it’s useful to recall the progressive objectives the Trudeau government set for the talks and compare them with what it actually got in the renamed United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
Freeland set out the objectives back in August 2017, just two days before the start of what turned out to be 14 long months of tumultuous negotiations on a new NAFTA.
A progressive agreement would encompass five ingredients, she said at that time. It would:
- Bring strong labour safeguards into the core of the agreement.
- Integrate enhanced environmental provisions to ensure no NAFTA country weakens environmental protection to attract investment and that “fully supports our efforts to address climate change.”
- Add a new chapter on gender rights.
- Add another new chapter on Indigenous Peoples.
- Reform the investor state dispute settlement process to ensure governments “have an unassailable right to regulate in the public interest” without risking lawsuits by investors for alleged discriminatory practices.
Based on what’s known thus far about the specifics of the USMCA, Freeland can claim to have successfully achieved two of her five objectives, winning enforceable, stronger labour standards and elimination of the investor state dispute settlement process altogether.
She can claim a partial success on environmental standards. And while she did not get separate chapters on gender rights and Indigenous Peoples, provisions on those two issues are woven throughout the agreement.
NAFTA includes only side deals on labour and the environment - essentially just aspirational goals to improve working conditions and committing each country to enforce its own labour and environmental standards.