Fight for NAFTA

Donald Trump’s tweak has turned into Donald Trump’s thump. An eight-page draft letter from the American president’s administration to Congress last week called for an overhaul of the North American Free Trade Agreement that would overwhelmingly tilt the scales in favour of the United States.

It might as well have ended with this PS: Canada and Mexico — watch your backs.

This isn’t the innocuous little “tweak” to NAFTA that the U.S. president promised Justin Trudeau when Canada’s prime minister visited Washington last month.

It looks more like a plan to tear down and rebuild with the best space and most privileges reserved for the Americans. Canada and Mexico can sleep in the basement.

NAFTA was likely the last thing on Trudeau’s mind in those heady days after he won the October 2015 federal election. Thanks to Trump, it’s now the PM’s biggest foreign-affairs challenge.

Among other things, Trump wants to end the right of countries to appeal unfair trade actions to an independent panel.

Canada has relied on this mechanism to settle countless trade disputes with the U.S., and never more effectively than when it ended punitive American duties on Canadian softwood lumber more than a decade ago. Scrapping this appeal process would hurt Canada.

Of course, Trump wants more. He wants to give the U.S. authority to unilaterally impose tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico whenever an American industry feels threatened.

We wish Trudeau good luck in talking trade reason to an unreasonable president. And our fingers are crossed.

Waterloo (Ont.) Region Record