We need a new approach to border and trade relations with our nearest neighbour, the United States of America, the current North American Free Trade Agreement is unenforceable and it certainly hasn’t seen the projected benefits touted by the creators of the agreement.

A lack of leadership on issues central to NAFTA and our present disagreements with our neighbour is threatening to squash an agreement that could have been a shining example for other bordering nations to follow; instead it’s a black eye on neighbourly relations.

Will a new administration in the US help alleviate our failure to regulate the flow of people and goods between NAFTA partners? Will NAFTA members work together to detect, anticipate, and respond to emerging commercial, infrastructure, environmental and security challenges of the future and fairly, according to agreements signed, resolve disputes in a final and binding manner, instead of allowing some partners to do as they wish?

NAFTA was first agreed to in 1994, the creating of a free-trade zone, to provide access to each partner members investors, guaranteeing energy access and providing dispute resolution mechanisms with highly debatable results.

Since then the agreement has failed Canada in areas of tourism, forestry, agriculture exports and safety, and transportation, and NAFTA continues to give preference to national policy and domestic governments.

The result has been a prolonged and costly dispute over softwood lumber that has cost thousands of Canadians jobs and livelihoods, the long and arduous exclusion of Canadian cattle from the US meat markets, and the derailment of the Canadian tourism sector. Add to this the recent documentation and travel requirements under the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, the creation of the US Secure Flight Program, which requires Canadian air carriers to submit passenger lists to the US 72 hours before flight departures that may not even land in the US, which is illegal according to the 1944 Chicago Convention on Civil Aviation and Canadian privacy laws, and reasons for scraping NAFTA in favour of a new agreement, one that can be legally binding, become apparent.

Agreements with other partners around the world should be looked into, the Europeans would be happy to allow Canada to do business in Europe, and maybe we should have looked into this alternative originally.

We probably wouldn’t be in the pickle were in now, if we had tied our tail to the Europeans, instead of the Americans and we wouldn’t always be arguing over things that were already agreed upon, but have suddenly become inconvenient for our partner.

Image Credit: ImmigrationMexicanAmerican