Canada relieved at NAFTA revamp
At long last, the Americans have “come to their senses on trade,” said Lawrence Martin in The Globe and Mail. During 13 tense months of negotiation over the North American Free Trade Agreement, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened and blustered, falsely portraying NAFTA as a one-sided deal that allowed Canada to rip off the U.S. His negotiators made “outrageous demands,” such as abolishing the dispute-resolution system that lets Canada raise objections to U.S. tariffs in an independent panel rather than in the U.S. court system. The Trump team also wanted Canada to give up protections for its cultural products, such as newspapers and TV stations; submit to new auto tariffs; and agree to a short-term sunset clause for the whole pact. But in the end, the Americans “finally got reasonable.” The NAFTA replacement deal struck last week, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), has none of those hated provisions, but does contain the labor and environmental protections we wanted. And because Trump was so hyperbolically insulting to Canada during the talks, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has “political cover” for the few concessions he did make. “Canadians understood what he was up against.”
The new deal is basically NAFTA rebranded, said Mitch Potter in the Toronto Star. Renaming the pact USMCA—notice how it “literally names America first”—gave Trump “the nativistpleasing yet entirely meaningless fist bump he was looking for.” Yes, Canadian dairy farmers are angry that the new deal allows more U.S. milk into Canada. But during the talks on the Obama-era Trans-Pacific Partnership—the proposed 12-nation pact that Trump killed upon taking office—Canada had already agreed to give the U.S. access to 3.25 percent of its dairy market. The USMCA merely boosts that to 3.6 percent, and Trudeau has promised farmers compensation. This outcome is “as close to painless” as we could have hoped. There was give-and-take on both sides, said the Toronto Sun in an editorial. We agreed to a cap on auto exports, for example, but it’s quite high, so “this critical industry will not be harmed.”
Yet the deal will still cause pain, said David Moscrop in Maclean’s. Trump has refused to lift the U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs that he imposed earlier this year. And Canadians now face increased drug costs, because our negotiators caved to a key demand of U.S. Big Pharma: “longer protection periods for biologic drug patents against generic competition.” Of course, Trudeau had no choice but to cave, given that the U.S. buys nearly 80 percent of our exports. We ought to seek new overseas trade partners to avoid being subject to American bullying, but there’s a sneaky clause in the pact that could see Canada kicked out of the USMCA if we sign a major trade deal with China over U.S. and Mexican objections. Still, we could tighten relations with the European Union and our fellow Pacific nations. “America is intimidating, and it’s local, but it won’t always be the alpha and omega.”