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March 12, 2008 As NAFTAgate was just starting to make front-page news in Canada last week, trade analyst Chris Sands was telling Embassy magazine to take U.S. renegotiation rhetoric seriously. "The initial comments [by U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama] were open to interpretation much more," Chris Sands, senior associate of the Canada Project at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., told Embassy. "But once [the candidates are] playing defence, they just make these commitments and the public will hold them to them." Both Obama and Hillary Clinton have said they would like to take a close look at NAFTA if elected president this November with the aim of amending the agreement's investor-state dispute clause (Chapter 11) and improving environmental and labour protections. Failing that, they said during campaign stops in Ohio, they would both consider abandoning the deal completely. According to Sands, speaking with Embassy, had it not leaked out to the press that this might all be election pandering, "We would have gotten the Obamafied SPP, which would have a new emphasis on environmental standards as well as labour standards. "But the farther Obama goes trying to show, now that his credibility has been questioned, that he's prepared to be tough, the worse it is…. Unfortunately, he's going to have to do something." Embassy interviewed Liberal Trade Critic Navdeep Bains, who essentially echoed the Conservative line when he said, "When it comes to labour mobility rights and environmental standards, Canada is on par—if not exceeds—American standards." What Bains and the Harper government fail to mention is that those higher standards are currently being harmonized down to U.S. levels through the SPP. NAFTA is, therefore, being renegotiated already but not for the reasons most U.S. Democratic voters would like to see from their eventual presidential candidate. Currently, state-level fair trade coalitions are upping the ante by constantly refining their questions for Clinton and Obama with each new primary contest. The first question on the Wisconsin Fair Trade Coalition's list started with some preamble: "We believe the NAFTA model has failed the U.S. and our trading partners. During the NAFTA era, we have seen one out of every four U.S. manufacturing jobs destroyed and real wages decline. NAFTA incentivizes offshoring by providing foreign investors special protections that eliminate the risks of moving to low-wage countries. It has resulted in scores of attacks on our domestic environmental, health and safety laws upon which communities rely. NAFTA bans buy-American initiatives, and limits our ability to inspect for the safety of children's toys or the food supply. The NAFTA-model pacts such as CAFTA and various other free trade agreements simply replicate these problems." The coalition then asked Clinton the simple question: "Will you commit to renegotiate NAFTA and CAFTA, during your first term of office, to meet the standards you lay out for future generations." Her answer: yes. At a recent meeting in Washington, D.C. of Canadian, Mexican and U.S. groups opposed to NAFTA, a representative of these state-level initiatives committed to refining such questions to include reference to the SPP, which (if NAFTAgate was an example) would offer hope of an expanded SPP debate across the continent leading up to the November U.S. elections. In summary, and as Sands told Embassy magazine, election rhetoric can quickly become election action under the right conditions. Creating and maintaining those conditions will be largely up to us.
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