On the campaign trail, Donald Trump set himself apart from fellow Republicans and even Hillary Clinton by advancing a protectionist trade agenda and promising to renegotiate or scrap the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico. So, the president celebrated on Monday after last-minute negotiations with Canada advanced a new version of NAFTA.
“It’s an amazing deal for a lot of people,” Trump said during an address at the White House.
However, critics say the current draft of the $1.2 trillion deal would not completely halt the outsourcing of US jobs to Mexico, and it imperils one of Trump’s other campaign promises: reducing the price of prescription drugs for US consumers.
The draft of the deal, known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), includes updates to reflect advances in digital technology and changes meant to address NAFTA’s most controversial impacts in the US, namely the outsourcing of domestic manufacturing jobs in the automobile sector. And while the proposed agreement includes some new limits on corporate power that progressives have demanded for years, unions have been reluctant to throw their support behind the current draft of the deal.
“The bottom line is that we simply do not have enough information at this time to know whether NAFTA 2018 is in the economic interests of the United States,” said AFL-CIO Trade Policy Specialist Celeste Drake in a statement, shortly after the USMCA was released on Monday.
Congress still has to vote on the deal, and environmental and public health groups are already demanding lawmakers reject the new NAFTA altogether.
“The Trump administration released the text of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement trade deal that would enshrine and globalize Trump’s deregulatory zealotry into a trade pact that would outlast the administration and imperil future efforts to protect consumers, workers and the environment,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food…