Trudeau close to finalizing new trade deal
TRUMP, DEMOCRATS REPORTEDLY READY TO AFFIRM TRADE AGREEMENT WITH CANADA, MEXICO
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared to be one step closer to finalizing a free-trade pact with the U.S. and Mexico on Monday, potentially ending a prolonged political deadlock that has weighed on the broader Canadian economy.
An agreement to ratify the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) would notch a major political victory for the battered Liberals, who returned to Parliament last week with a minority government and a weakened mandate. Concerns had been growing that House Democrats in the U.S. would not ratify the deal before 2020, after which attention would turn toward the presidential election and ongoing impeachment proceedings.
USMCA was signed by the three countries last year, but U.S. ratification has been stalled for months amid disagreements over Mexican labour rights and the agreement’s treatment of steel and aluminum, among other things.
Speculation about a potential deal came after news reports by Bloomberg and The Associated Press on Monday, which said U.S. President Donald Trump and the Democrats had reached a deal on the latest version of USMCA, which replaces the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement.
As of late Monday afternoon, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had not yet signed off on the deal. She has been reviewing changes to the agreement that U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and his Mexican counterpart Jesús Seade have put on paper over the past week.
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who led USMCA negotiations for Canada, said in the House of Commons on Monday that Trudeau discussed the new trade deal in his meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump last week. She did not confirm whether the U.S. was close to an agreement.
“In the lives of ordinary Canadians, there is perhaps no issue in our relationship with the United States that matters more than trade,” she said in Question Period.
Freeland said Canadian officials “have been working intensively, including (having) many conversations over the weekend and this morning with our American partners on getting the deal finalized.”
A potential agreement would remove a major anchor on the Canadian economy. The Bank of Canada, among other observers, has pointed to trade uncertainty as a key reason why business investment has been slower than expected, crimping GDP growth.
Trump also told reporters on Monday that stakeholders had been making “strides” toward ratification.
“I find all of that very interesting and we’re trying to express it in some ways, like our big focus on apprenticeship learning and skilled trades training, our effort to emulate the German valorization of trades and apprenticeships as being equivalent to professions and academic learning,” said Kenney.
It’s a movement that has been gaining steam in American conservative circles, especially since Donald Trump’s election as president, and it has been slowly creeping across the border. In the summer, about two dozen Canadian conservative big-thinkers crowded into a Toronto pub to hear economist Oren Cass, a former policy wonk for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, tell them to put the focus on production and jobs, rather than consumption and corporate profits.
These ideas have been championed by former UK Prime Minister David Cameron and a myriad of thinkers on the right in the United States. More recently, it has been a flagship of U.S. Senator Marco Rubio who has styled it as “common good capitalism,” which tries to ensure large corporations are benefiting workers rather than just focusing solely on accumulating profits.
Although Kenney would support a rethink of the federal Conservative Party’s ideas, he has solidly backed leader Andrew Scheer amid questions about his leadership.
With Scheer facing constant questions during the campaign about his views on same-sex marriage and abortion, even some conservatives have made the argument that it’s no longer possible for someone with social conservative views to run successfully as leader. Kenney cautioned against assuming everyone who is devoutly religious has socially conservative views.
“I think we should tread carefully before excluding people of faith from the public square and from public life,” said Kenney. “I think that Canadians pride themselves on the pluralistic nature of our democracy and it’s not pluralism if it excludes people of faith.”
A recent poll from the Angus Reid Institute found 63 per cent of Canadians say they are neutral about the idea of a candidate being a person of faith but that 22 per cent say it repels them, with 14 per cent saying it attracts them to that candidate.
The poll also found that Canadians are extremely skeptical of promises from people of faith that they won’t let their personal views interfere with how they govern the country.
“It’s not a coincidence that the first fundamental freedoms enumerated in the Charter of Rights are the freedoms of conscience and religion,” said Kenney.
Kenney was in Ottawa on Monday and Tuesday with what he was calling “Team Alberta” — eight cabinet ministers and a posse of officials who will make the rounds with their federal counterparts, industry leaders and Opposition politicians. He was also hosting political and industry insiders at Ottawa’s private Rideau Club Monday night. He will meet the prime minister Tuesday afternoon.
The Alberta premier said he was demanding a “fair deal” for Alberta and his provincial government has taken out frontpage advertisements in Ottawa newspapers to help drive the point home. Specifically, Kenney wants Justin Trudeau to commit to a fixed completion date for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, which will move more Albertan oil to the Pacific coast.
Kenney also wants changes to the federal Fiscal Stabilization Program, which helps cushion provinces against short-term economic volatility, but has been capped at such a low maximum that it has been of little help to a large economy like Alberta’s. The request, which was echoed by all the other provinces and territories last week, has elicited an optimistic response from Ottawa. On Monday morning, Finance Minister Bill Morneau confirmed he was open to talking about changes to the program.
Also on the list of “several dozen” requests that Kenney is bringing to Ottawa is a request to rewrite Bill C-69, which modified environmental assessments for large energy projects, and a complete scrapping of the government’s tanker ban law, which effectively bans Canadian oil exports from B.C.’s north coast.
Although Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley has already accused Kenney of running a “leadership campaign” for the federal Conservatives,” Kenney says he only hopes to influence the party by example.
“I think that’s laughable,” said Kenney, who went on to list all the stops on his lengthy adventure in merging Alberta’s Conservative parties and then becoming premier in the spring election.
“And all of that just to go back to where I started?” said Kenney. “I guess I should be flattered that they think I’m some kind of Svengali-like genius, but that doesn’t make any sense to me at all.”