Getting a Grip on NAFTA

(Vancouver Sun)

Christopher Jones, VP of Public Affairs, Tourism Industry Association of Canada

The U.S. presidential primaries have provoked debate there and in Canada about reopening the North American Free Trade Agreement.

As this political fracas subsides, perhaps calmer heads can prevail to address the more obvious shortcomings in the current approach to Canada-U.S. border and trade relations.

The lack of leadership on NAFTA has created a vacuum that threatens the largest bilateral trading relationship in the world. The arrival of a new administration in Washington could help correct the original failure to develop the supranational institution required to regulate the flow of people and goods between NAFTA member states; to detect, anticipate and respond to emerging commercial, infrastructural, environmental and security challenges, and to resolve disputes in a final and binding manner.

I propose the creation of a North American Border and Environmental Agency (NABEA).

NAFTA came into force in 1994, creating a free-trade area, providing “national treatment” to each others’ investors, guaranteeing energy access and providing dispute resolution panels with debatable results.

However, in areas relevant to tourism, forestry, agricultural exports and safety, and transportation, the agreement continues to give preference to national policy and domestic bureaucracies.

The result? A prolonged and damaging dispute over softwood lumber; the lengthy exclusion of Canadian cattle from U.S. markets; the imposition of documentation and travel requirements under the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) to the detriment of the Canadian tourism sector; the creation of the U.S. Secure Flight Program, which will require Canadian air carriers to submit passenger manifests to the U.S. 72 hours before departure of flights that may not even land in the U.S. (in contradiction of the 1944 Chicago Convention on Civil Aviation and Canadian privacy laws.)

Many of these policies required costly litigation, endless lobby campaigns in Washington, and immense expenditures of Canadian political capital, time and effort over the past 15 years, often to little or no avail.

By contrast, the Treaty of Rome, which created the European Economic Community in 1957, mandated a supranational commission made up of member-state appointees whose primary loyalty is to the EEC (now the European Union) and its founding objectives: Harmonious economic development activities; continuous and balanced expansion; increasing stability; rising standard of living, and closer relations between member states. The European Commission plans, integrates and coordinates member-government policies in trade, transport, environment and other fields to the EU's collective benefit. Read the complete article.