Free trade across America’s northern border is at risk of remaining frozen in the 1990s as the veneer of hopeful rhetoric fades from the NAFTA negotiating table. That’s bad news in New England and Atlantic Canada, where time-tested trading partners would have benefited from the fulfillment of a more modern, inclusive reboot of the deal.
Although two of the region’s top trade commodities, energy and lumber, fall largely outside the parameters of NAFTA, the renegotiation might have struck pay dirt for this northeastern part of North America, which relies on shrewd partnerships and ambitious dealmaking to compete globally. Instead, defensive reflexes have crowded out the best intentions of dragging the trade deal into this decade and the ones that lay ahead.
New England and Eastern Canada (Atlantic Canada and Quebec) form an economic neighborhood of 25 million people sewn together by integrated supply chains and common challenges. Those north-south trade ties predate the east-west corridors that developed later with the enthusiastic assistance of prescriptive government policies on each side of the border.
Then — as now — political agendas had a way of getting in the way of the natural ebb and flow of business across borders. A true, new free trade deal, brokered to unleash economic growth and remove obstacles to cooperation, could have helped to outlaw unexpected interference by governments.
