Looks like trade pact a win for Trump

Whether it passes or not, the president will claim NAFTA 2.0 as a victory

It certainly looks like U.S. President Donald Trump has decided that whatever happens to the new NAFTA trade deal — an agreement that could govern the vast majority of Canada’s international trade — he wins.

If it gets ratified by Congress, he gets to say he successfully renegotiated NAFTA as he promised to do when he called it the “worst trade deal ever made.”

But if the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA as it’s called in the U.S., doesn’t pass through the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, he gets to hammer them for inaction as they’re trying to impeach him.

Republicans have been running TV ads for weeks attacking Democrats with just that message. On Monday, Trump called out the Democratic speaker who controls the House agenda: “It’s sitting on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. She’s incapable of moving it, it looks like.”

It seems Democrats have noticed and may be eager to turn it around: to pass the deal and point to it as evidence that they continue to do the important business of the country — even to work with Trump — as they pursue impeachment.

Democrats have been working to tweak the deal to ... respond to concerns from the labour movement

At a town hall meeting in Alexandria, Va., last week held specifically to discuss impeachment, Democratic Rep. Don Beyer cited it among a list of accomplishments he said showed a Congress that remains focused on business. “We are very likely, I think — well, I put it at 73 per cent that we will, our Democratic house, will ratify the new ‘NAFTA Two,’ the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, before the end of this year,” he told his constituents. “Which gives Donald Trump a win. We’re not going to hold back with good policy because it happens to be a win for Donald Trump.” On Monday, hours after Trump blamed Pelosi, she offered her own comments to reporters saying she and her caucus were pretty much ready to go, and pointed back at Trump, saying they’re just waiting on approval of some finetuning from Trump’s representative.

Democrats have been working to tweak the deal to, among other things, respond to concerns from the labour movement about the likelihood of labour standards in Mexico being enforced. Like Beyer, Pelosi said she expects a deal to be done by the end of the year, though allowed that it could be next year.

International trade lawyer Daniel Ujczo of Dickinson Wright said Democrats won’t want to let it slip too far into next year, because they don’t want Trump’s political football to be kicked around through the election campaign.

“You know, they’re just at the point where you’re either going to have a deal or you’re not. And so there really wasn’t much more to talk about,” Ujczo said. “So I think just from a practical perspective, it made sense that we would see this over the last few days. Politically, it’s important, too, because the Democrats want to show that they’re not just sitting on USMCA while they’re trying to impeach the president.”