Premiers hope for quick NAFTA deal
Provincial and territorial leaders in Washington to meet with administration, lawmakers and business leaders
WASHINGTON -- Canada’s premiers have left a series of meetings in Washington expressing hope that the upcoming renegotiation of NAFTA will be quick and relatively pain-free, rather than a drawn-out bargaining slugfest.
Eight provincial and territorial leaders were in town for meetings this week with U.S. administration officials, lawmakers, and business as they gathered insights on the upcoming North American Free Trade Agreement talks.
Ontario’s Kathleen Wynne said she came away encouraged. She said heard a prevailing desire for a lighter touch, with upgrades aimed at modernizing the deal with provisions on newer industries like data services.
Some of those adjustments had already been worked out in the ill-fated Trans-Pacific Partnership, which included chapters on things like cloud computing and biologics medicines that weren’t an issue in the 1993 NAFTA.
Now the U.S. says it wants to recycle some of those elements in NAFTA and other agreements.
“I would say that overall, the quicker, less comprehensive review is what people are looking at. I don’t mean by that that there wouldn’t be a lot of detail because there always is in these negotiations,” Wynne said in an interview.
“But I think everyone I spoke to felt there was a way through this negotiation that would not overturn everything in the agreement ... I think there’s a hope that we can move through this pretty efficiently, improve what’s there, add what's missing.”
The U.S. strategy will become clearer when it publishes its negotiating priorities this sum- mer. A preliminary document is due in midJuly, and the three North American countries are expected to start negotiating in late August.
Manitoba’s premier said the U.S. has a choice to make.
“If this is about (simple) tweaking, that can be something we hopefully can do in short order,” Brian Pallister said.
“But if this is about fundamentally entering into another agreement that departs from the concept of win-win then we’ve got a longer negotiation on our plates. And I don’t think we should minimize the reality, the importance of this.”
He said that what he heard in about a dozen meetings this week with U.S. lawmakers, with only one exception, was an attitude similar to his — that NAFTA can be modernized in a way that benefits all countries.
But the messages are still a bit mixed, said his New Brunswick colleague Brian Gallant, citing talk of “quick and comprehensive” negotiations: “I think you can do both, but I don’t think that’s likely."
If forced to pick between extensive negotiations or the status quo, he said he favours the latter: “I would pick nothing at all (in terms of changes).”
A top Canadian trade expert in Washington is skeptical about a quick and easy deal.
That's because there are too many business constituencies involved, not to mention political processes, and everyone will want their priorities reflected in the deal, said Laura Dawson, who hosted the premiers at an event Thursday at the Wilson Center.
The deal would need to satisfy enough people to pass a vote in the U.S. Congress.
“I see a lot of optimism for (simply doing a) modernization. But modernization is very subjective — every country, every sector has a different understanding of what modernization might look like,” Dawson said in an interview.
“I just see no way to get out of these negotiations by the end of the year,”