Hurry on EFTA Deal: Norway

(Embassy – Lee Berthiaume)

A Norwegian minister has encouraged Canada to “hurry” and implement a free trade deal whose intended coming-into-force date will likely be missed because of last week’s federal election.

“My feeling is all the time that we are in a hurry,” Tora Aasland, Norway’s minister for research and higher education, told Embassy on Monday. “So everything that happens that makes things take a long time is not very good.”

After almost 10 years of negotiations, Canada and the four countries that make up the European Free Trade Association – Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein – signed a free trade agreement earlier this year.

The deal was approved by Parliament and implementing legislation was introduced just before the House rose for summer break. At that time, members of the Commons’ trade committee were studying the pending Canada-Colombia trade deal, and were angered when the government completed those negotiations before its study was complete.

As a result, opposition members ignored government attempts to make approving the EFTA implementing legislation the committee’s top priority, and it remained on the agenda for when Parliament resumed. The election call in September, however, effectively killed the implementing legislation, and it will have to be re-introduced whenever Parliament resumes in order to be ratified.

Ms. Aasland said she has full respect for the Canadian parliamentary process. “That could happen in my country too,” she said. “So we have to respect that. But I would like to express personally, on behalf of myself as a minister of research for Norway and also as part of the Norwegian government, we are in a hurry.” Read more here.