Fortress North America is replacing free trade in Canada’s lexicon |
Some 143 witnesses sat before officials at public hearings held last year by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) on the future of North American trade. All made their case for the agreement that governs over a trillion dollars in cross-border commerce. They talked about jobs. They talked about factories. They talked about China. They talked about winning.
Nobody talked about free trade.
My colleagues and I analyzed the full transcript record as well as 993 written submissions filed by organizations in advance. What we found was an absence of terminology so complete that the omission cannot be characterized as a stylistic choice but rather a policy fact. The word “globalism” does not appear. “Comparative advantage” appears twice. The vocabulary that built the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which Canada has staked its prosperity on for 30 years, has been scrubbed from the most important trade talks on the continent.
Fortress North America replaces free trade
One moment from the hearings stays with me. Goldy Hyder, president of the Business Council of Canada, leaned into his microphone and told the room that “Fortress North America” was already the phrase American policymakers were using. Ontario Premier Doug Ford had for months been road-testing “Fortress Am-Can” to describe a potential “renewed strategic alliance.” By December, U.S. witnesses at the hearing were turning that proposal into a demand. “We should be building Fortress North America,” said the American Kitchen Cabinet Alliance.
Think about what that phrase does. It takes a decades-long trade agreement, rooted in the idea that........