U.S. President Barack Obama said on Tuesday he still wants to reopen the North American Free Trade Agreement, despite a warning from Canada that this would be a mistake, but he said he did not want to end up curbing trade.
In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp, shortly before his visit to Ottawa on Thursday, Obama also declined to characterize oil from Canada’s vast oil sands region as “dirty oil” which should somehow be curtailed.
Obama had alarmed Canada during the Democratic primaries last year when he advocated renegotiating NAFTA, and he reiterated this goal on Tuesday while recognizing these were sensitive economic times.
“As I’ve said before, NAFTA, the basic framework of the agreement, has environmental and labor protections as side agreements. My argument has always been that we might as well incorporate them into the full agreement so that they’re fully enforceable,” he said in the interview with CBC television.
However, he also said: “I think there are a lot of sensitivities right now because of the huge decline in world trade.”
Obama noted there was $1.5 billion in trade between Canada and the United States every day, adding: “It is not in anybody’s interest to see that trade diminish.”
When Obama raised the issue of toughening up NAFTA on the campaign trail a year ago, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said if Washington “made the mistake” of opening the agreement, Ottawa would bring other issues to the table for renegotiation.
How the Administration plans on being able to keep trade going and keep “other issues” from coming “to the table for renegotiation” is, of course, anyone’s guess. I know that Barack Obama is the Candidate of Hope, but Hope is not a plan, whatever the President might think.
The last things we need during a severe recession are (a) tax increases and (b) policies that may end up diminishing free trade. And yet, the Obama Administration will likely give us the former (to pay for the massive deficit it is going to give us thanks to perhaps multiple Keynesian stimulus packages) and is flirting with the latter.
If anyone doubted
Adjoran Wednesday, February 18th at 3:48AM EST (link)that Obama was anything but an ignorant doctrinaire leftist, this should wake them up.
This and the odious “Buy American” provisions in the Porkulus bill are red meat to the unions, while threatening the entire trade regime we have been working upon since the first GATT in 1947.
Anyone else hear the echo of Smoot-Hawley and the results of the last international trade war we started with the foolish notion we could “protect” our economy by building walls against imaginary enemies?
Since Obama sent Churchill’s bust back, perhaps we should reflect upon the great man’s wisdom:
“We say that every man shall have the right to buy whatever he wants, whenever he chooses, at his own good pleasure, without restriction or discouragement from the state . . . in pursuit of this simple plan there came last year into England from every land and people under the sun, millions worth of merchandise, so marvelously varied in its character that a whole volume would scarcely describe it. Why did it come? Was it to crush us, or to conquer us, or to starve us, or was it to nourish and enrich our country? It is a sober fact that every single time . . . however inconsiderable, all that vast catalogue of commodities came to our shores because some man desired it, paid for it, and meant to turn it to his comfort or profit.”
Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 1904
Maybe Obama thinks Harper is a Republican
scipio62 Wednesday, February 18th at 7:01AM EST (link)How the Administration plans on being able to keep trade going and keep “other issues” from coming “to the table for renegotiation” is, of course, anyone’s guess.
Could be that Obama might think getting Harper liquored up could work.
Of course, only three of the 219 Republicans in Congress voted for Porkulus, and Harper is more conservative than those three.
A just war leads to a just peace and freedom. An unjust peace leads to death.
How to keep "other issues' off the table?
GCBWI Wednesday, February 18th at 2:52PM EST (link)He’ll just tell the Prime Minister of a sovereign nation, “I won.”