[LINK] "If Donald Trump kills NAFTA, Canada could benefit"

[rfmcdonald]

Thomas Walkom, writing in the Toronto Star, strikes me as being much too sanguine about the risks of blowing up the North American trade architecture.

Donald Trump says he’ll tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement if he can’t renegotiate a better deal. That has spooked Canadians.

We should relax. We should take a deep breath. Depending on how it’s done, getting rid of NAFTA could work for us.

Even without NAFTA, goods could continue to flow tariff-free back and forth across the Canada-U. S. border. That’s because the original Canada-U.S. Free Agreement of 1989, which eliminated most of these tariffs, has never been repealed.

It was superseded by NAFTA in 1994. But it continues to exist. And should NAFTA be axed, it will automatically come into play again.

[. . .]

So what are the differences between the FTA and NAFTA? One is that the earlier deal doesn’t include Mexico — which means that, so far at least, it is not on the U.S. president-elect’s hit list.

The second is that, unlike NAFTA, the original Canada-U. S. pact doesn’t allow foreign corporations to challenge Canadian laws.