The Trump Administration has pursued a sharply different – and for its trade partners unsettling – trade policy from that followed by the United States in the postwar period. While much attention has been focussed on the oftentimes contradictory, oftentimes theoretically unfounded, and...

Establishing disciplines on the US trade remedy measures was in the view of Canadian policymakers the single most important demand that Canada tabled in the free trade negotiations with the United States leading up to the 1989 Canada-US FTA. The outcome was the Chapter 19 mechanism for...

Canada is developing a progressive trade agenda (PTA) that is pitched as a response to the rise of anti-globalization populism. This note reviews the concept of the PTA, its motivation, the specific elements that comprise it, the likely efficacy of these measures in addressing the factors...

The US negotiating objectives in the NAFTA renegotiation feature a puzzle: the main body of the text is grounded in familiar concepts of rules-based trade, under which trade agreements establish an enabling framework but leave it to the private sector to decide what trade actually takes place,...

As the NAFTA Renegotiation potentially heads into the end-game, this note provides a brief back-of-the-envelope estimate of what is at stake to contribute to the understanding of the decision rule that is likely guiding Canada’s negotiators. It concludes that, on the basis of what is known...

Building on, and indeed ratcheting up, the rhetoric of the US election campaign, the new Trump Administration has signalled disruptive change to US trade relations. The not-yet-in-force Trans-Pacific Partnership was torn up on day one of the new presidential term, the future of NAFTA was thrown...

After 26 years of trading under the North American Free Trade agreement (NAFTA), Mexico and its North American partners enter a new phase with the entry into force of United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on 1 July 2020. This note quantifies the potential impact of the agreement on...