Canada, The United States and Mexico begin the task of reforming the North American Free Trade Agreement on Wednesday, and if the pre-negotiation talk is any indication, the three nations have a lot of ground to cover.

Many issues have been outlined and priorities highlighted in the months since U.S. President Donald Trump swept into office and promised to renegotiate an agreement he called “a trading disaster.”

BNN asked observers and stakeholders this week to outline the themes, issues and bargaining chips that should be in the forefront as the talks get underway.

 

ON CHAPTER 19 DISPUTE RESOLUTION

“Americans don’t like Chapter 19, which is the system of reviewing dumping and counter-veiling duty determinations by agency, and they don’t like it because of the perceived loss of sovereignty. … I think we may have to wait and see just how much the Americans want to dig in. What’s clear is that the key trade people around Trump don’t like Chapter 19. I think that will be some kind of a red line for the Canadian government... Whether it should be or not? I think hopefully Canadians will debate that over time.” 

-- Mark Warner, principal at MAAW Law

 

ON ENERGY

“Recent events under the previous administration in the U.S. said, ‘Well, we may not let you pipe your oil into the U.S.’ So, I would say, ‘Why should Canada in the future NAFTA have to run the risks of that happening again?’ If you want a continental energy market – which I think is in all three countries’ interests – then you should make sure it’s open and it can’t arbitrarily be closed. … Energy trade is generally open but what we need to do is to make sure we have a framework to keep it open.”

-Andrei Sulzenko, executive fellow at the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary

 

ON DAIRY

“Dairy was not part of the original NAFTA agreement and we don’t see any real evidence that indicates it should be part of any future negotiation. … Certainly we continue to advocate with our federal government that supply management not be part of the negotiations.”

- David Wiens, Vice President, Dairy Farmers of Canada

ON THE SOFTWOOD LUMBER DISPUTE

“They’ve been through some pretty tough negotiations, but an obvious thing they could do immediately off the front is Canada could eliminate log export restrictions in British Columbia, especially on private land, as an opening gesture to the Americans to come to that agreement that the Canadian industry wants.”

- Brenda Swick, partner, Dickinson Wright

 

ON E-COMMERCE

“The United States has a lot of high-profile e-commerce companies – Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc. – [who] are going to want continued full access to the Canadian market under NAFTA, and that’s a good thing for consumers. We don’t have those kinds of companies here in Canada; but we do have some sort of new companies that are starting up [and] we’re going to want to make sure that they have access to the U.S. market, or - if they don’t - they’re going to move to the United States. We don’t want that to happen.”

-Jan De Silva, president and CEO, Toronto Region Board of Trade

 

ON MAINTAINING A UNITED FRONT

“I think we’re very well-prepared. You’ve seen from day one that this is Team Canada playing. Not only the Prime Minister, but cabinet ministers, provincial ministers, premiers, mayors, business people. This has been Team Canada playing to make sure that our U.S. counterparts understand the breadth and depth of our relationship. … We’ve been lucky that we’ve established a level of trust. I think Prime Minister Trudeau, with President Trump [enjoy] a very trusting relationship between the two leaders and that’s serving Canada very well.”

-François-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s Minister of International Trade

 

ON THE VALUE OF THE CANADA-U.S. RELATIONSHIP

“We have to make sure that agreement is modernized, but let’s keep those markets open. We’ve been diversifying our export interests to Asia successfully over the last 10 years. We were 60 per cent dependent on the U.S. for our exports, we’re now closer to 50, but it’s still half. We need that relationship, we need to have it barrier-free in terms of trade and I think the risk is that we back up at all from the level of freedom we have in the flow of goods and services between our two countries.”

-Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall

 

ON CANADA’S ENVIRONMENT, GENDER AND INDIGENOUS OBJECTIVES

“I think the motivation was domestic politics. I think it was putting down markers to say to the Canadian people and to say to perhaps the progressive electorate who put them in power: ‘We’re not losing sight of your issues.’ How it will be interpreted on the American side and even the Mexican side is also an important consideration. I think the Mexicans will be curious. The Americans stand to be a little put off by this. Climate change is obviously not an agenda item for them. The gender and indigenous people agenda is also not something that I can imagine they’d want to inject into an already very complex negotiation.”

-Peter MacKay, former Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister

 

ON TRUMP

“I don’t think that the President’s office has come forward with a lot of clarity of exactly what their ultimate goals are. We had a lot of kind of sweeping projections, that we’re going to make revolutionary changes in NAFTA. … I’m hopeful that that translates into a more carefully-crafted and more incremental set of changes that don’t really disrupt the basic partnership that has been so powerful between the United States and Canada for so many years.”

-Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper

 

ON WILLINGNESS TO WALK AWAY

“The thing that I would like to see followed through [from Canada] is the willingness to walk away from the table if things aren’t going the way that you want. If the U.S. starts to become very volatile in their negotiation stance – which is the way Trump has for the most part been working – I’d like to see Canada be able to say, ‘You know what? No deal is actually the best thing right now.’”

-Som Seif, CEO, Purpose Investments