NAFTA Negotiations Could Be Gaining Momentum
One day after President Donald Trump said negotiations were going "really well," Canada's foreign minister told reporters that technical staff had gotten some issues far enough along that she and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer were set "to make some decisions." Trump also said, "I think Canada very much wants to make a deal."
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The president of the Canadian Labour Congress also visited with reporters waiting outside the office of the USTR on Aug. 30. "I am somewhat optimistic and cynical at the same time," Hassan Yussuff said. "We've been led down this path once before. I think we have to have some strong enforceable language."
Yussuff said he hopes to see text once Canada is done, and then he'd be able to judge the sincerity of the Mexican side and USTR. "They've made a lot of noise that the whole reason they're doing this is because they felt this agreement was a fraud. Well, if it's truly a fraud, and they're trying to fix it, they better get the details right, otherwise it will remain a fraud for working people in this entire continent " Unlike Trump, Yussuff did not talk about Mexicans stealing Canadian jobs, even as he acknowledged cockpit assembly jobs were transferred from Canada to Mexico. "There's nothing wrong with sharing jobs. This is not the issue," he said. Rather, the issue is that because Mexican workers don't have democratic unions, companies are able to exploit their cheap labor, he said.