Beatty said that during negotiations for the 1988 bilateral trade deal between Canada and the United States that preceded NAFTA, the dynamics that played out between Ottawa and Washington, D.C. were "quite different" of what they are now between both capital cities.
He said there was "a very close personal" friendship between U.S. President Ronald Reagan, a Republican like Trump, and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, a conservative in whose cabinet Beatty served at the time as defense minister.
"Without that relationship, the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement wouldn't have been possible because there were so many vested interests that worked against trying to take down barriers and open up trade," Beatty explained.
"In this case, we have an existing agreement that by any empirical standard has been very beneficial to all three countries. Logic would say you need a compelling reason not to continue with it. Yet what we're dealing with here is a politically and ideologically driven approach to trade that often ignores the facts."
Robertson, an Ottawa-based vice-president of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, a foreign policy think-tank headquartered in the western Canadian city of Calgary, noted that Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be in Davos, Switzerland next week attending the World Economic Forum where NAFTA will likely be raised in any conversations between both leaders.
But ultimately the hard work will occur at the negotiating tables, and Robertson believes there are three possible outcomes to next week's talks in Montreal, which have been extended by one day to Jan. 29.
【国际英语资讯:News Analysis: Make or break for NAFTA at next weeks talks in Canada】相关文章:
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