Op-Eds
There’s been a wringing of hands among members of Canada’s trade-policy community over the suggestion that the Trudeau government might do a revised trade deal with the U.S. on a bilateral basis instead of linking hands with Mexico and keeping the negotiations within the trilateral NAFTA framework.
There was pushback over a column of mine last month proposing just that – that Canada should pursue talks with the Americans bilaterally instead of within confines of the North American free-trade agreement. This wasn’t because of disregard for Mexico, but because trade issues between Canada and the U.S. are fundamentally different than the problems the Trump administration has on its southern border.
Given this…
Incoming U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross will be releasing a list of NAFTA matters for discussion shortly as renegotiation of the trilateral trade deal is high on the agenda of President Donald Trump. While the renegotiation may commence soon, Mr. Trump has threatened to tear up the North American free-trade agreement as a negotiating strategy. Can the President follow through with this threat and unilaterally cause the U.S. to withdraw from NAFTA, or must Congress agree?
The possibility of a unilateral withdrawal without Congressional approval would put real pressure on the Canadian and Mexican governments to agree to U.S. demands. However, in my report I show that under the Constitution, Congress must agree if the…
As a Nobel Laureate once said, “The times they are a-changin’.”
The global trading system has been thrown into disarray with Donald Trump’s election and his clear disdain for international trade commitments – or, put another way, his stridently protectionist policies designed, he says, to make America great again.
This amounts to a decisive turnaround from the leadership role U.S. administrations have played since formulating the Bretton Woods agreements of 1947-48. Those American-led efforts produced the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and ultimately the WTO Agreement of 1994, with the United States leading and cajoling other governments to agree to an orderly international trading system based on widely, if…
In Europe, as in the global economy more generally, growth has been too slow for too long. In Europe, unlike elsewhere, this is setting up an existential crisis. Restoring growth now and on a basis that directly addresses the social discontent fuelling the rise of political fringe parties has become mission-critical to sustaining the experiment.
Many solutions have been tried or proposed. Nothing has worked well, and nothing will unless the European economy is shifted from its current bad equilibrium of stagnant growth and deflationary pressures – stag-deflation, which is the mirror image of the stagflation (slow growth and high inflation) faced by the industrialized world in the 1970s.
The solution to stagflation was to…
The fate of the Canada-EU trade deal remained unclear on the weekend, thanks to the objections of Wallonia, a region in Belgium few Canadians had ever heard of before now.
After spending agonizingly frustrating days in Brussels trying to salvage the deal, Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland finally lost patience and walked out of talks on Friday, a totally appropriate response under the circumstances.
Given the amount of political capital the Trudeau government has invested in supporting this Conservative-negotiated agreement, criticisms of Ms. Freeland by Conservative politicians last week were puzzling to say the least. Even though the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) was concluded by the Harper government…
