The U.S. resumed NAFTA talks with Canada today in hopes of ironing out an agreement in conjunction with the one the U.S. and Mexico reached last week.
The negotiations with Canada have been contentious with Trump threatening to pull out of NAFTA in favor for a trade deal with just Mexico, while Canadian Prime Minister has said he will would rather not sign a deal than sign a deal that is bad for Canada.
The GroundTruth Project's Charlie Sennott told Boston Public Radio that he doesn’t believe that either leader will budge on their demands.
“We are really going to see this intersection of wills right now between Trump and Trudeau, and what’s going to happen with NAFTA,” he said.
Trump has been vocal about wanting to renegotiate the nearly 25-year-old deal since his presidential campaign, calling it the “worst trade deal ever” many times in speeches and tweets.
Sennott sees the Trump administration’s NAFTA negotiations as an attempt to merely repackaging and rebrand the agreement, which may be hurting our relations with Canada and Mexico. He said that Trump has disregarded the nature of the multilateral deal by negotiating separately with the countries, and questioned why “we are treating two good allies with such contempt.”
“Trump is trying to ram forward now with his new revisions and his new rebranding as a uni-lateral deal. I’ll deal with Mexico and I’ll deal with Canada, and I’ll deal with them separately, and I’ll take them on one on one, and I’ll make it happen,” he said.
“We live in a globalized world, a globalized economy, and we have a nationalist president who wants to be bilateral, not multilateral, he continued.”
