There is a reason people are reluctant to open a can of worms; once it is open, the wiggly critters tend to escape and can be very hard to get back in the can.
It’s an old adage United States president Donald Trump should perhaps have thought of before forcing a renegotiation of the long-standing North American Free Trade Agreement.
Of course, Trump has shown he very much marches to his own drumbeat, even if his drum appears badly out of tune with common sense in general, and reality on more than a few occasions.
But questioning Trump’s reasons for opening NAFTA now is pretty much worrying about why someone left the barn door open after the horse has escaped, to continue in the vein of old sayings.
Regardless of the reasoning, the NAFTA deal needs to be renegotiated, and from the perspective of Canada in general, and Canadian agriculture specifically, the sooner the better.
Perrin Beatty, the president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, touched on the need for urgency when he spoke at the annual Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce Conference held in Yorkton recently.
Beatty said there are also some key issues before the country now which businesses need to be keeping abreast of, and have a say in, depending on how things progress. The first are the ongoing negotiations around the NAFTA.
Beatty said NAFTA is “something that is special in North America,” adding it has been a benefit to the three countries involved.
So the key in negotiations is not to do anything which hurts the signatories in terms of trade.
“What is crucial is we do nothing that undermines it,” said Beatty.
That said, Beatty did suggest some changes are warranted, noting, as an example, at the time of the original negotiations and signing for NAFTA “e-commerce didn’t exist.”
There are also new job classifications today which should be covered in the deal which are not because they also did not exist at the time, he said.
Beatty said the next days are crucial in the current negotiations, as a deal needs to be in place soon ahead of presidential elections in Mexico this summer and Congressional elections in the United States this fall.
The Congressional and Mexican presidential elections were thought by many to be the motivation to hammer out a deal through May, but the reality of a complex document with each side having agendas they see as important have pretty much scuttled the likelihood of deal anytime soon.
Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. Trade Representative, came out recently suggesting a deal is a long way off and there are now indications from some quarters that a deal might well not be achieved before sometime in 2019.
A lot can change in that time, including the potential of a new Mexican head less supportive of NAFTA and a change in the congressional mix stateside.
At risk is a deal that. while never perfect through its history, or even fair on every commodity, at least provided a known framework of rules to follow which was a general positive for trade among the three countries.
Calvin Daniels is Editor at Yorkton This Week.
