NAFTA deal is out of date, says original negotiator

WASHINGTON — The North American Free Trade Agreement is out of date and needs to be brought into the 21st century, said one of the trade agreement’s original negotiators and most ardent champions, adding his voice to the explosion of commentary following the election of Donald Trump.

Mickey Kantor was the negotiator brought in by Bill Clinton to finalize the deal in 1993, when the then-rookie president promised to add side agreements on labour and the environment and appointed Kantor as his first U.S. trade czar.

He remains a big booster of the pact — he said it has promoted economic growth in all three signatory countries, in addition to encouraging more harmonious relations. But don’t count him among all the people hand-wringing about changes to NAFTA. He said it and other agreements he reached in the 1990s were tailored to an economy that no longer exists, and require modernization.

“There was no Internet. There was no cloud. There was no problem with data transfer. We had a whole different world,” Kantor told a symposium organized this week by the libertarian Cato Institute. “No agreement — certainly none I ever negotiated — is perfect. They all need to be updated.”

Kantor said he’d advise a Trump administration to make that among its top priorities. Trump indeed has promised to renegotiate or scrap the treaty, which has caused some anxiety among U.S. neighbours who send the overwhelming majority of their exports to the U.S.

Both Canada and Mexico have responded to the election result by saying they’d be willing to sit down for a discussion.

Like Kantor, Susan Schwab was a U.S. trade representative, albeit with a Republican administration under George W. Bush.

“NAFTA is an ancient trade agreement. It’s hopelessly out of date. That’s not to say it’s a bad agreement,” Schwab said.