The failure of the United States administration to win congressional authority for fast track trade negotiating authority last autumn will slow down but not sabotage the world’s move to freer trade, Canadian trade officials said last week.
But Canada hopes the U.S. will reverse that decision by spring, when negotiations are to begin in Chile on a free trade zone throughout the Americas.
“Fast track authority would be an important message that the U.S. is willing to be a leader,” Michel Leir, director general of the U.S. bureau from the federal foreign affairs and international trade department, told the Senate agriculture committee Dec. 11.
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“But the delay in American fast track authority will not deter us from pursuing our own free trade agenda.”
He said Canadian officials expect U.S. president Bill Clinton to line up the congressional support needed to win trade negotiating authority by April.
Fast track authority would allow the U.S. administration to negotiate treaties in the Americas or at the World Trade Organization and then to present the package to Congress. Congress would have the right only to accept or reject the package.
Without fast track authority, Congress could examine any treaty line by line, amending as it goes.
No confidence in U.S.
No country would be comfortable negotiating with the Americans, and making the compromises which come with negotiations, if the deal then could be wrecked by a protectionist Congress, said Leir.
Clinton asked Congress for negotiating authority this summer but withdrew the request before a vote in autumn when it was clear it would be defeated by congressmen nervous about the impact of freer trade on their constituencies.
The Canadian foreign affairs official said Canada will continue to become involved in freer trade negotiations.
But he said the Americans ultimately must sign on if the deal is to mean anything,
“Canada believes fast track authority is vital for continued trade liberalization world-wide,” Leir told senators.
Senator Eugene Whelan, never a big fan of the free trade theologians in government, said he considered fast track authority a way for big business and bureaucrats in the U.S. to negotiate a deal they like and then to “bypass the elected representatives.”
He said the bureaucrats’ enthusiasm for free trade and the benefits it has brought Canada during the past nine years is deceptive.
“If anyone says free trade is responsible (for expanded exports), it is a lie,” he said. “If we had a dollar at par, we wouldn’t sell a damn thing.”
