Playing Monopoly with a three-year-old
An interesting note in one of Canada’s national newspapers this week revolved around the not so secret ‘war room’ that the Liberal government has set up to deal with the looming NAFTA negotiations. NAFTA, for the acronymically challenged, stands for North American Free Trade Agreement and it’s one of the things that makes trade between Mexico, Canada and the U.S. one of the most lucrative three-way streets in the world.
Of course, not everyone thinks that way and for those who lost manufacturing jobs and couldn’t find other employment at the same wage rate it was a disaster. A disaster caused by sneaky Mexicans who will work for a whole lot less and devious Canadians who subsidize cheese and chicken production. Enter Donald Trump.
As a candidate for the Republican Party nomination and as the successful challenger to Hillary Clinton for the job of President, Trump bent over backwards to secure the vote of every disaffected, blue collar worker in the northeastern “rust belt” by blaming NAFTA for everything from job losses to Lyme disease. It was, in his way of thinking, the worst trade agreement the world has ever seen. It was so bad those who negotiated it should have been tarred and feathered. Why, if he had it his way The Donald would throw the whole pact out the window and start over.
Of course, that was on a Tuesday. By Wednesday, the orange-haired leader of the free world had changed his mind. Canada wasn’t really a problem but those clever Mexicans had stolen much of the American car industry and a whole lot of California’s fruit business by working for mere pesos and were running up a terrific trade surplus at the United States’ expense. Come Thursday, the Commander and Chief changed tack once more and complained that Canada was dumping cheap lumber into the American construction industry and subsidizing milk prices, and it had to stop.
It was at this point that Justin Trudeau and his cabinet decided that they were never going to be able to keep up with a president who had the attention span of gnat and who based policy decisions on what he read on his cereal box that morning. So, using an election type strategy, they set up a committee solely devoted to NAFTA. It was designed to react and react quickly to every step Trump made in the tweeting fan dance that passed for policy statements. It would run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week until a new NAFTA was signed.
The committee is faced with several problems however. First it has to base its understanding of Trump’s demands for changes to NAFTA on an endless flow of tweets. Figuring out exactly what the President thinks about the technically complicated trade in a huge variety of dairy and poultry products, which took four years to work out in the first place, by examining a series of 140-character notes is like translating the Rosetta Stone, only a bit more complicated.
The second problem is that renegotiating NAFTA will be carried out by third parties representing three countries, and one of those countries, the biggest and richest, will be trying not only to understand what the other two want but trying to figure out what their own leader wants. Think of playing monopoly with a three-year-old in charge of the rules.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that President Trump keeps saying that if the United States doesn’t get a better deal – read “its own way” – he’ll move to drop out of the agreement entirely. With the billions and billions of dollars worth of trade and the millions of American jobs that decision would cost it’s not likely. Then again, he did get elected President.