PrairiePundit

F.H. Buckley: If you’re trying to make sense out of the NAFTA negotiations, where Canada is suddenly rushing to avoid being shut out of a US-Mexico deal , consider this: With his insufferable moral arrogance, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been cruising for a bruising — and now he’s gotten it. Given Trudeau’s attempt to reinvent the country as the smarmy Eddie Haskell of nations, it’s been fun to watch — but let’s make sure it doesn’t end up costing both Canada and the United States. Trudeau’s first rude awakening, by the way, didn’t come at the hands of Team Trump. Justin had become a laughingstock when visiting India last February, where he dressed the family Bollywood-style. Even the Indians thought he was a joke. More serious was his next reality check, via the Saudis. The Canadian foreign ministry had tweeted that Saudi Arabia should release women’s-rights activists, and the Saudis responded by closing their embassy, ordering Saudi students to return home and freezin...

Washington Examiner: The Trump administration announced a deal Monday with Mexico to update the North American Free Trade Agreement to force auto manufacturers to source more parts from North America, among other changes. The deal did not involve NAFTA's third partner, Canada, and President Trump said his preference was to cut a separate trade agreement with Canada that would "terminate" the existing NAFTA framework and instead replace it with two bilateral trade deals, at which point NAFTA in its current form would be "terminated." "We have an agreement... both with Canada and with Mexico: I will terminate the existing deal. When that happens, I can't quite tell you, it depends on what the timetable is with Congress," Trump said. "But I'll be terminating the existing deal and going into this deal." Trump added that the deal with Canada would either be a negotiated agreement, or the imposition of new U.S. tariffs on autos to c...

Washington Examiner: U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said Thursday that the U.S. was close to reaching a broad agreement on how to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, but provided no indication of when the deal would be finalized or what changes would be included. "Hopefully, we are in the finishing stages of achieving an agreement in principle that will benefit American workers, farmers, ranchers, and businesses," Lighthizer told the Senate Appropriations Committee in prepared testimony, adding that the talks were being done at an "unprecedented speed." It was an optimistic take on the situation. The renegotiations have been stalled for two months and aren't likely to restart in earnest until next year, when Mexico's newly elected president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is sworn in. During the most recent talks in May, officials from the U.S., Mexico, and Canada indicated they were close to a deal, but that several key i...

Washington Examiner: Trump tells Trudeau and Canada: U.S. will ‘agree to a fair deal, or there will be no deal at all The story does not indicate what would be the elements of a "fair deal."  It also does not explain why the US is insisting on the sunset clause or why Canada finds it objectionable.  I get the impression that Canada has been subsidizing the steel it sells in the US.

Brownfield: Leaders from the US food and agricultural sector have created a new coalition in support of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Americans for Farmers and Families is highlighting the impact of NAFTA on the economy and Joshua Baca, spokesperson for the coalition, says 43 million US jobs depend on trade with Canada and Mexico. “We want to make sure that this side of the story is told.. There are a lot of stories out there about what NAFTA has or hasn’t done,” he says. “The reality for the food and agriculture sector is, NAFTA has been a huge job and economic boost for the industry. We want to be a helpful dialogue in helping policymakers across the country understand what that impact is.” ... This does not surprise me at all.  Agriculture is a seasonal business and trade in agricultural products allows groceries to keep food in the market that would otherwise not be available over an extended period of time.  As an example, the blueberry season...

Fuel Fix: At appearances in Houston this week, Energy Secretary Rick Perry said it makes sense for the United States, Canada and Mexico to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, in part because of the enormous new supply of U.S. oil and gas locked in once-inaccessible shale rocks. Asked whether renegotiating NAFTA – a thorny and potentially yearlong process that the Trump Administration began this summer – would affect energy trade between the three countries, Perry said the renegotiation was a "good process; it's a healthy process." "Fifteen years ago, they told us we found all the oil and gas there was to find and that the days of being able to develop oil and gas were over with," Perry said, "Well, that's not the case. So does it make sense to sit down with our colleagues in Canada and Mexico to renegotiate a new North America Free Trade Agreement? Yes, I think it does." ... "Our friends in Mexico and Canada are pretty good...

Mark Mix: Big Labor admits in NAFTA demands forced unionism costs jobs, right-to-work laws attract them ... As the Toronto Globe and Mail reported last month, the Trudeau government strongly believes that voluntary unionism gives the U.S. an "advantage" over Canada "in attracting jobs." Normally, any powerful elected official who made such a claim would be denounced and ridiculed by union officials. But Trudeau wants to "fix" the U.S.'s right-to-work advantage by eliminating all state right-to-work laws rather than by prohibiting forced unionism in his own country. Consequently, Trudeau is now being hailed as a hero by union bosses such as Jerry Dias, the president of Unifor, a Canadian union conglomerate. Union-label Canadian politicians' improbable vehicle for destroying the right to work is the ongoing renegotiation of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. Dias encouraged the Trudeau government to demand that Congress and Pres...

Telegraph: Britain could join trans-Atlantic trade alliance bigger than the EU if there is no deal on Brexit It would be a better deal for Britain than staying with the EU.  It is not clear to me whether this is a negotiating ploy in an attempt to get concessions from the EU on Brexit.  With Britain in NAFTA the four countries would control 30 percent of world trade.

John Cornyn: Free trade has taken a lot of hits this campaign season. Candidates from both parties have argued that this core tenet of capitalism should be completely rewritten, if not entirely erased. The reasoning goes something like this: If we open up our economy and cut trade deals with other countries, we run the risk of sending American jobs overseas. That may sound convincing, but those claims are often exaggerated and ignore the tremendous benefits trade provides folks here at home. And it flies in the face of what we've experienced here in Texas and across the United States. With about 95 percent of the world's consumers outside of our country, in today's globalized world, staying competitive means looking beyond our borders. As the country's No. 1 exporter, our state's producers do that remarkably well. More than 40,000 companies in Texas sell their goods and services abroad. And of those, more than 90 percent are small and medium-sized businesses. In...

Daniel Griswald: With all the challenges confronting the United States, the two major presidential candidates have committed themselves to picking a needless trade fight with the two biggest customers for U.S. exports: Canada and Mexico. Hillary Clinton recently joined Donald Trump in threatening to reopen and potentially scuttle the 22-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement. But tearing up NAFTA would be an economic and foreign-policy blunder of historic proportions. NAFTA was a bipartisan achievement, approved by Congress with strong Republican support and signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1993. Once fully implemented, the agreement eliminated virtually all trade barriers between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. By every reasonable measure, NAFTA has been a success. The trade agreement delivered its core promise of deeper North American economic integration. Since its passage, our two-way trade with Canada and Mexico has more than tripled, with trilateral trade flo...

Rich Lowry: FOR Barack Obama , hope can triumph over anything - except for open trade with a neighboring country with an economy 1/20th the size of ours. Then, all is despair. Obama's culprit is Mexico, our third-largest trading partner. It is trade deals like NAFTA - the 1993 accord eliminating tariffs among America, Mexico and Canada - that "ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with teenagers for minimum wage at Wal-Mart," Obama intones. Feel inspired yet? The big picture doesn't justify this Dickensian evocation of gloom. Since 1993, the US economy has grown by 54 percent. The jobless rate has dropped from 6.9 in 1993 to 4.9 today. Manufacturing output has increased by 63 percent. Canada and Mexico are our first- and second-largest export markets, and US merchandise exports to them have increased at a slightly faster clip than exports to the rest of the world. NAFTA has clearly been a (small) benefit to the economy of both the United States and Mexic...