Candidates’ NAFTA Stance Stirs Canada

(Financial Times)

Canada has warned that the U.S.’s privileged access to its oil and natural gas could be in jeopardy if a Democratic administration backtracks on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Canada is the U.S.’s biggest foreign oil supplier, exporting close to 1.8m barrels a day - more than 10 per cent of U.S. consumption. NAFTA provisions make it difficult for Canada to restrict oil shipments to the U.S.

“If NAFTA is ripped up then the Chinese can buy more of our oil; there’s no further obligation on the part of Canada to sell its oil to the U.S.,” a Canadian diplomat told the Financial Times.

He was responding to statements this week by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the two Democratic presidential hopefuls, that they would be prepared to pull out of NAFTA it was not renegotiated.

“We will opt out of NAFTA unless we renegotiate it and we renegotiate on terms that are favourable to all of America,” Mrs Clinton said in her debate with Mr Obama in Ohio.

George W. Bush, U.S. president, criticised the Democratic rivals for “trying to score political points” at NAFTA ‘s expense and said the U.S. had benefited from the deal.

“One statistic I think people need to know is there’s roughly like $380bn worth of goods that we ship to our NAFTA partners on an annual basis,” he said, in a White House press conference.

“There’s a lot of farmers and businesses, large and small, who are benefiting from having amarket in our neighbourhood.”

Although Mexico, the third signatory to the treaty, is the overwhelming focus of much of the U.S. disquiet about NAFTA, Canada would also be affected by a renegotiation and has signalled that it would have demands of its own.

“NAFTA has been kind of a foundation of integrating the North American energy market,” David Emerson, Canada’s trade minister, said in Ottawa. “If you reopen [NAFTA] for one or two issues, you cannot avoid reopening it across a range of issues.” Click here for the complete article.