Any day now, I worry, we will hear that time is up on trying to graciously appease America’s appetite anew to claw further into our domestic policies – that the three-sided North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will be bread put out of pique by the president into the toaster.
With that could start a dissembling of a continental pact that has served Mexico, Canada and particularly the United States exceedingly well in stabilizing a geographically contiguous territory with globally continuous progress toward market efficiency.
Jobs will be lost. Products will be more expensive. Companies will collapse or move away. Predictability will be struck down. Emotions will fray and the two friendliest countries will grow frostier.
To be sure, there are many hurdles to scale before NAFTA is gone. The U.S. has to quit the deal with six months’ notice to Canada and Mexico. Canada could wedge itself into the fledgling U.S.-Mexico deal in the next few weeks, in time for approval before Mexico’s president leaves office. Congress could push back, soon if it wants the administration to return to the table or later after mid-term elections that might recast the balance of power. But there is clear damage done now, trauma to the trade partnership that through diplomacy and common will further cemented countries with vastly more similarities than differences. Mainly because of belligerence.
Canada has been a friend, a supporter, an ally in war and in less trying times, polite when we disagreed and respectful of the relationship, deserving of benefits of the doubt.
We have been open to America, shared in our commerce as no countries do, and tried to protect from its exploit so little of what we have – pieces of our culture, minor elements of our industry and, yes, a rather peculiar management of the supply of our dairy products. And we’ve fought for a system to resolve disputes, even though courts have generally seen fit to clobber any undue tariff.
For all this, seemingly naught.
In recent days, as it became clear Canada was not capitulating, Donald Trump brought briefly to bear his hyperattention, got his usual chest-thumping self and unleashed his hypermasculinity on the prime minister and his misogyny on our foreign affairs minister.
His lieutenants continue to cover for the president, excusing away his irrationality as a clever negotiating tactic in his art of the deal. It is no such thing. It is a blasphemy of our history. It will stain our status as partners, even were he driven from office, because many of his Republican allies who know all too well he is walking the economy off a cliff will not bow up.
I remember as a journalist in Ottawa the testy talks that culminated first in the Canada-U.S. breakthrough deal and later the trilateral NAFTA. The negotiators would scratch their heads at times, carefully select terms to describe progress and lack thereof, but stop short of inducing anxiety or fear amid the tension and testiness.
Justin Trudeau has not been without his inelegance in his NAFTA strategy: too obsequious at first, too indirect with us on his boundaries throughout and too smug as we closed in on the faux deadlines we knew were more notional than actual.
Still, he has not blinked – at least, not yet.
Perhaps he knows that NAFTA is a document that is not easily torn. Perhaps he has faith that the members of Congress, many of them in states of economic dependence on NAFTA’s continuance, won’t abide any obsession by the White House to impose a raft of tariffs that will circumnavigate the accord.
Perhaps he believes that common sense will prevail in a time of crazy-making.
He had better be right, because as we close in on the one-year countdown to an election, his term’s economic legacy cannot be a fumbling of our trading identity. His ambitions have been largely unmet – on climate change, on First Nations, on electoral reform and on encouraging investment, among other things.
But he cannot expect to be forgiven if he has taken lightly the threat to our well-being that would surely come with failure to effect a better NAFTA. I stand to be made more optimistic. •
Kirk LaPointe is the editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
