Will Moore’s loss in Alabama be a win for Canada?
The scandal-tinged defeat of Roy Moore in Alabama’s special Senate election is raising faint hopes that it might embolden some decidedly reluctant Republicans to speak out in support of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Despite Moore’s obvious flaws, his defeat has also been widely seen as a repudiation of Trump’s agenda, which includes tearing up NAFTA if he can’t wring concessions out of Canada and Mexico.
The Trudeau Liberals have been mounting a full-court press to win support for NAFTA in the U.S., not just in Congress but among businesses as well as state and local governments.
U.S. business groups, including its Chamber of Commerce, have loudly defended NAFTA and urged Trump not to announce a U.S. withdrawal next year.
But the response from American lawmakers has been tepid at best. Capitol Hill is seized with tax reform, and some Republicans don’t want to ignite a war with their hairtrigger, Twitter-friendly president or risk offending Trump supporters in their core base.
In fact, Trump is being encouraged to stay tough in NAFTA negotiations by people who aren’t normally his allies.
Sen. Bernie Sanders and other members of the anti-NAFTA left held a news conference Wednesday where they demanded that the president keep his promise to drastically overhaul the agreement.
“We are here today to send a very loud and clear message to Donald Trump: for once in your life keep your promises,” said Sanders, a Vermont senator and former presidential contender.
“We need to fundamentally rewrite NAFTA.”
Sanders expressed support for hardball U.S. negotiating positions like increased Buy American protections, and he wants to go even farther than Trump and not just water down the investor-state dispute mechanism in Chapter 11, but end it entirely.
He also wants Trump to go farther on labour standards and to end incentives to outsource jobs.
But Perrin Beatty, the president of Canadian Chamber of Commerce, said Wednesday the defeat of Moore resonated in meetings he had Tuesday in New York City with his American business counterparts.
“I’m hopeful that it will mean moderates will be emboldened and will be saying, ‘Look … we have to do what’s good for jobs and focus on these bread and butter issues,”’ Beatty said from New York, where he was trying to raise NAFTA’s profile as part of a tour that also included a stop in Philadelphia.
“I’m not under any illusions that the Republicans lost because of NAFTA, but this certainly does demonstrate it’s important for the party to represent much more than a fringe.”
Sarah Goldfeder, a former U.S. diplomat in Mexico and Canada who is following the trade negotiations at Earnscliffe Strategy Group in Ottawa, said Moore’s defeat is “going to fuel the traditional Republican core” and has the potential to moderate the right-wing influence that has taken hold.
“Those people are going to push for a back-to-basics Republican party,” she said. “That trade is good, business in good, jobs are good, unions bad — it’s that party.”
Trade lawyers in Canada and the U.S. were less optimistic that the Alabama result would make it easier to talk about NAFTA.
Dan Ujczo, an Ohio-based international trade lawyer, said when he initially heard the news about Moore’s defeat the first question he asked was: what does this mean for NAFTA?
After thinking about it, he concluded: not much.
“Roy Moore was a fundamentally flawed candidate,” he said. “I don’t know how much we can extrapolate out from Alabama to a repudiation of the Trump agenda.”