NDP’s only choice is to take TPP or leave it
Tom Mulcair says he would renegotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact if he wins government.
The New Democratic Party leader says that Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper struck a bad deal for Canada and that he could do better.
Certainly, Mulcair is right about the TPP’s problems.
By allowing cheaper Asian auto parts into North America, it effectively eliminates the special status Canada’s automotive industry enjoyed in the U.S. market.
Unifor, the union that represents most autoworkers, calculates the deal will cost Canada 20,000 wellpaid manufacturing jobs.
As Mulcair correctly noted in Nova Scotia Wednesday, it will also make some prescription drugs more expensive.
But if a new government is elected on Monday, would it be able to persuade the 11 other countries involved in the TPP to offer Canada better terms?
Or is this effectively a take-it-orleave-it deal? And, if that is the case, would Mulcair or Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau be willing to walk away from it?
Certainly, Canada hasn’t had much luck in renegotiating past trade deals.
During the 1993 election campaign, then Liberal leader Jean Chrétien promised to reopen the North American Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. and Mexico to fix what he said were serious flaws.
After winning the election, Chrétien approached then U.S. president Bill Clinton and asked that the deal be reopened. Clinton refused and that was that. Chrétien signed onto NAFTA.
The TPP would be even harder to renegotiate. The North American deal involved only three countries; the Pacific deal encompasses 12.
The only ace in Mulcair’s hand is the possibility that the pact might not make it through the U.S. Congress.
There it has been attacked from both the left and the right.
Deal opponents got a boost last week when Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, formerly a staunch backer of the TPP, appeared to reverse herself.
“As of today, I am not in favour of what I have learned about it,” Clinton told the PBS network.
But Clinton, who is fighting hard for the Democratic presidential nomination, didn’t rule out changing her mind again, once she learned more.
In effect, her position is halfway between that of Mulcair (who says he opposes the deal as is) and Trudeau (who says he supports the idea of the pact but won’t commit him- self to specifics until he reads the final text).
Clinton’s quasi opposition to the TPP may buttress her nomination bid by earning support from Democrats opposed to free trade.
But it is not at all clear that her pronouncement will affect the outcome of a congressional vote where so-called centrists from both the Republican and Democratic parties say they like the deal.
In the end, any new Canadian government could still be faced with a stark choice: Accept a flawed TPP or opt out of the pact completely.
There are costs to both. The cost of staying out of the trade pact is that foreign automakers might prefer to locate their plants in the U.S. where they would have access to both Canada (under NAFTA) and Pacific nations like Japan and Australia (under the TPP).
In short, with or without Canada’s participation, the TPP will cause Canadian auto jobs to disappear.
The cost of staying in the trade pact is that Canada may be drawn even more tightly into a globalized world where individual nations have little control over their future.
I say “may” because, according to the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, multinational corporations will have less leeway under the TPP to challenge health and environmental laws than they currently do under NAFTA.
We won’t know whether this assertion is true until the text of the still-secret deal is made public.
For Mulcair, his pledge to renegotiate the TPP is good politics. But it is not realistic.
It’s unlikely that the 11 other countries involved will be willing to reopen this deal just to placate Canada.
Should the NDP win any role in government after Monday, it will almost surely find that the only choice it faces in regard to the TPP is between yes and no.
Canada can accept a bad deal. Or it can walk away entirely. Thomas Walkom’s column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.