With NAFTA, the Americans will be playing hardball

If there were any doubts as to how the Americans plan to play the NAFTA game, all were removed Wednesday faster than a home run ball leaving the bat of New York Yankee rookie phenom Aaron Judge.

It’s hardball, baby. That’s what they’ll be playing, and they’ll be swinging for the fences.

Robert Lighthizer, U.S. President Donald’s Trump chief trade negotiator, made it crystal clear when he took to the field on the negotiation’s opening day. He was there to win for the Red, White & Blue, whether it meant pitching inside, brushing them back with some high and tight heat, or even introducing a little beanball action if such a warning was merited.

“We feel that NAFTA has fundamentally failed many, many Americans, and needs major improvements,” Lighthizer told a hotel ballroom filled with the top trade players from the three countries involved in the pact, adding that the original NAFTA agreement has cost 700,000 American jobs during its 23-year existence.

His boss, said Lighthizer, “is not interested in a mere tweaking of a few provisions, and a couple of updated chapters.”

Such bluntness must have been a shock to Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland who, just two days earlier, had set out Canada’s negotiation goals in language that, while Trudeau-Liberal progressive to a fault, had virtually zilch to do with NAFTA.

Perhaps she has to be reminded that the T in NAFTA stands for Trade, and that trade has little or nothing to do with the environment, gender equality, indigenous recognition, and all the other Liberal purple-prose fuzziness that is heartwarming but not pragmatic.

And there are a lot of bucks involved in NAFTA, some $1.1 trillion in 2016, and those are Yankee dollars not cheap loonies and cheaper pesos. Remember Ross Perot? Well, back in 1992, when this weird little multimillionaire was running as an independent candidate for the U.S. presidency, he made his opposition to NAFTA a key plank in his platform.

He warned voters that huge wage disparities between the U.S., Canada and Mexico would have a dire impact on the American economy.

“There will be a giant sucking sound going south” he said.

It was too little too late, of course. U.S. President George H. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Mexican President Carlos Salinas had already signed off on the deal, although newly-elected U.S. President Bill Clinton was left to ratify it when Bush was defeated.

But here’s a quote from Clinton that he would likely want forgotten.

“NAFTA means jobs ... good-paying American jobs,” he said at the time. “If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t support this agreement.”

Now, almost a quarter a century later, we have Trump’s chief negotiator admitting without name mention that Ross Perot was right in his prediction that American jobs would be sucked south to Mexico. Some 700,000 jobs, by his count.

One would be hard-pressed, however, to find the word “jobs” from a Canadian perspective in Chrystia Freeland’s wish list for these NAFTA renegotiations. There was one quote found.

“Trade is about people, it’s about the best possible conditions for jobs, for growth and for prosperity,” she said on opening day.

That, folks, is lob ball, not hardball.