The biggest fight involved in renegotiating NAFTA could be determining how Canada and the U.S. are able to fight one another.

Former interim Conservative Party Leader Rona Ambrose told BNN that the dispute-resolution mechanism in the agreement is one of the biggest issues at stake in the future of North American trade.

“The area that they’d like to change is the dispute-resolution mechanism, which Canada has employed a lot,” Ambrose told BNN in an interview on Thursday. “And, we’ve used it because we’re a smaller country, we’re up against the United States. We really need to work in a rules-based environment and we need to be able to take these disputes to the tribunal when needed and fight based on the rules.”

Ambrose – currently global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute – said that the tribunal is not just something the Americans would like changed, but potentially something they’d like to eliminate.

“We’ve succeeded many times, on softwood and others. The Americans don’t think that that dispute resolution mechanism has worked well for them. In fact, they’ve talked about not just changing it, but getting rid of it and that will be a big point of contention for both countries.”

Another area that needs updating in any potential new agreement is how it treats the technological advances of the past quarter century, according to Ambrose.

“There’s great opportunities here to open up this agreement and do some modernization,” she told BNN.

“The Internet wasn’t around when NAFTA was signed; so from an e-commerce point of view, from a digital point of view and even from an intellectual property point of view, there’s all kinds of ways we can strengthen that space in NAFTA.”