Head of Canada's Largest Union Coalition Articulates Anti-NAFTA Argument
Jerry Dias, national president of Canada's UNIFOR syndicate, said that before NAFTA, Canada had a small trade surplus in goods with the world, but now it has a $120 billion deficit. He said that General Motors, while closing plants in Canada, doubled its capacity in Mexico. Mexican consumers buy 240,000 GM vehicles a year, and Mexico is on the cusp of producing 1 million vehicles, he said. "And guess where those jobs come from? Canada and the United States." Dias said Canada has lost 500,000 manufacturing jobs in the nearly 25 years that NAFTA has been in place. "Tell me why I should celebrate?"
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Dias, whose syndicate represents Canadian autoworkers and steelworkers, said he appreciates changes to NAFTA's auto rules of origin to incentivize production in Canada and Mexico and to require a certain amount of North American metal. Unlike nearly all the other speakers at the Canadian American Business Council event Feb. 21, he expressed no anxiety about President Donald Trump's threat to pull out of NAFTA to force a vote on the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. "If it's sticking with the old NAFTA or no NAFTA at all, I'll go with no NAFTA," he said.
Dias' was a lonely voice in a day of diplomats, politicians, business lobbyists and former politicians and diplomats who say NAFTA has been a boon for the region and are pushing for the ratification of the treaty that will update it.
Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the U.S., said he dislikes USMCA's moves toward managed trade in autos. Yet he believes there will be enough Democrats in Congress in favor of the deal to get the treaty through. "I think strategically, the Democratic leadership would not want to own the defeat of the USMCA," he said. "The problem is the mechanics."
But if Trump withdraws from NAFTA, and its replacement isn't ratified, "we may be left like a dog without two sandwiches," he said, translating a Spanish proverb -- "No USMCA, no NAFTA." He said that would be disastrous. Even if ratification fails but Trump does not pull the U.S. out of NAFTA, Sarukhan said, it will be a sword of Damocles over our heads. Quoting Trump's description of NAFTA, he asked: "Is he going to accept 'the worst deal ever' is the law of the land?"
Former Vermont governor Howard Dean, now a senior adviser in the public policy and regulation practice at Dentons global law firm, said ending NAFTA "would be America's Brexit. That's how disruptive it would be." But he said it's possible there would be a veto-proof majority in Congress to stay in NAFTA.
Michael Kergin, a former Canadian ambassador to the U.S., said it's not quite as bad as that, because the three economies are not as integrated as the U.K. and the European Union are. Still, Kergin said that economic nationalism could outlast the Trump administration. He said, "I worry somewhat that there are centrifugal forces and this may not be a passing phenomenon."