America will suffer

America will suffer without a new NAFTA, top Canadian official says

By BEN WHITE

If Congress does not approve the renegotiated U.S-Mexico-Canada free trade deal, Americans will feel serious pain, a top Canadian official says.

“We think the right conclusion is for the deal to be ratified,” said Bill Morneau, Canada’s finance minister, on the latest edition of the POLITICO Money podcast. “There are about 9 million American jobs that rely on trade with Canada. There’s almost a $700 billion trade relationship between the two countries, so $2 billion per day or so going back and forth. Any disruptions around those jobs or any disruptions around that trade are by definition not positive — not positive for Americans and not positive for Canada.“

The new accord, which President Donald Trump calls the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, faces an uncertain future in Congress. Democrats are demanding changes in return for approval. But any significant alterations could upset the delicate balance that led to the deal.

“I’ll be watching with interest, as will our trade negotiators, to see where this gets to. But our hope and our expectation is that we’ll get to the right answer,” Morneau said of possible changes to the deal coming from the U.S. Congress.

Trump has said he plans to kill the existing NAFTA and that failure to pass the USMCA would return the three nations to the system before NAFTA existed, threatening economic and market disruption.

The Canadians, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have largely refused to adopt Trump’s rebranding of the deal. Some also dispute how different the USMCA is from NAFTA, with most analysts viewing it as updated but not fundamentally transformed, as Trump has claimed.

“We can all debate on what a lot different or a little different means,” Morneau said. “There are clearly differences and there are differences that the United States sought.”

Morneau attributed Trudeau’s refusal to use the “USMCA” nomenclature to domestic concerns. “The reality is that we all have our own domestic situation. The average Canadian has an understanding of what the agreement is with the United States that’s been in place for a long time,” he said. “We don’t in any way dispute how President Trump wants to communicate. That’s absolutely up to him, to his discretion.”