TRADE TALKS

DID CANADA FUMBLE THE BALL ON NAFTA NEGOTIATIONS?

Three days to negotiate an economy-shaping deal. Allnight sessions. Threats of calamitous tariffs.

Canada’s back seemed against the proverbial wall Thursday as talks on a revised free trade agreement sped toward some kind of conclusion on Friday.

But veterans of past trade negotiations, academics and trade lawyers were divided on whether Canadian tactics over the last year in talks to revamp NAFTA were to blame for the pressure-cooker climax.

Some criticized the Liberal government for not pivoting quickly enough in response to President Donald Trump’s disruptive style, failing to appease Trump at a fateful G7 meeting in Quebec, and other alleged missteps.

Such errors may have left Canada on the outside for five weeks as the U.S. and Mexico reached a bilateral deal, leaving it just days to join back in, they suggest.

“I do think there has been tactical mistakes,” said trade lawyer Mark Warner. “(Trump) is erratic. If you’re dealing with someone who’s erratic, you have to adjust your strategy … They seem to have been working off a textbook that says ‘We’re not going to vary from anything.’”

Others suggest Canada’s tactics were appropriate and flexible in the face of a White House determined to overturn the widely accepted ground rules of free trade.

“I’m no apologist for (Prime Minister) Trudeau, and I’m not a fan of a foreign policy predicated on social issues,” said Gordon Ritchie, one of ex-prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s top negotiators on the original Canada-u.s. free trade agreement. “But just trying to be objective, what in the name of sweet bejesus are you suggesting we could have done instead?”

It’s easy for armchair quarterbacks to secondguess the handling of such negotiations, but far different to be in the midst of them, he said.

Ritchie says a chill still goes down his spine when he thinks of the U.S. trade representative’s office in Washington where Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and her team are haggling with American officials.

“They realize the decisions they make will have a profound effect on the Canadian economy, not to mention the politics. So you have this tremendous weight on you … and you’re dealing with this super power that’s acting like a thug and bully. It’s very, very tough.”

Indeed, Canadian politicians until recently had rallied around the Liberals on the trade file. Then came the protracted, bilateral talks between Mexico and the U. S., culminating in Monday’s announcement that they had reached a wideranging deal.

The White House set a Friday deadline for finalizing an accord, inviting Canada to join in — or be left on the outside and face the threat of tariffs on its auto experts.

Conservative leader Andrew Scheer broke the solidarity, questioning why Canada “was on the outside looking in.”

Meredith Lilly, a former trade adviser to ex-prime Minister Stephen Harper, also criticized the government’s “early missteps” in the talks.

“From pre-emptively offering to negotiate the deal before President Trump ever asked, to ragging the puck on negotiations throughout, to criticizing Trump following his departure from the G7 meeting in Quebec: Trudeau’s team placed Canada in the penalty box when it mattered most,” the Carleton University professor charged in a piece for CBC.

Warner said another mistake was Trudeau setting an agenda at June’s G7 meeting focused on issues — like gender equality — of little interest to Trump, rather than highlighting, for instance, business development to better engage with him. Trump and close aides launched a blistering attack on Trudeau in the wake of that summit.

A later speech by Freeland and an earlier interview in the New York Times that were critical of Trump did not help, he said.

The lawyer also suggested that Canada should have foreseen the shift toward bilateral talks with Mexico and did all it could to stay in the picture, even offering up some kind of concession.

But Ritchie called Trump’s post-g7 tirade “totally off the wall” unpredictable and noted Canada did try to get into the talks with Mexico, only to be rebuffed by the U.S.

Chip Roh, who was on the U.S. team that faced Ritchie on the first trade deal and America’s deputy chief negotiator for NAFTA, joked that he “used to hate all you (Canadian) bastards” when he was negotiating.

But he said Canada has acquitted itself well against a Trump team deeply skeptical of free trade.

“I haven’t been surprised by what I’ve seen, or thought, ‘Oh, Gosh, they’re really blowing it here.’ ”

Chris Sands, head of the Center for Canadian Studies at Johns Hopkins University, said Canada seemed to enter the talks tentatively, hanging back and offering relatively few innovative ideas at first, which the U.S. may have balked at.

But such minor “fumbles” were largely irrelevant, he said.

“You can’t Monday-morning quarterback on Saturday afternoon. The game isn’t over,” said Sands. “If they come out with a win, it doesn’t matter.”

Scotty Greenwood, Washington-based CEO of the Canadian-american Business Council, said she could find no fault with how Canada handled negotiations, the result of which may be a better, modernized NAFTA.

“This (Canadian) impulse for self-flagellation,” she said of criticism, “is in this instance inappropriate.”