Trump, Trudeau and NAFTA 2.0: tweak or transformation?

President Donald J. Trump and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s first meeting was bound to make waves. Social media was fixated by which of the two statesman best managed the handshake. The prime minister was generally applauded for avoiding being hauled into thepresident’s physical sphere of influence. Images showed the two leaders at press podia and in armchairs by the Oval Office desk: separate but generally comfortable. It was not exactly the chummy camaraderie Trudeau enjoyed previously with President Barack Obama. And while there was no high-vaunting rhetoric to match John F. Kennedy’s 1961 encomium that ‘geography has made us neighbours, history has made us friends, economics has made uspartners, and necessity has made us allies’, the focus on renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) certainly accentuated the challenges of geography and economics.

Claire Brownell, ‘NAFTA: it’s less important to Canada than you might think’, Financial Post,
9 February 2017, http://business.financialpost.com/news/nafta-its-less-important-to-c...
you-might-think.
2. Office of the US Trade Representative, https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/americas/canada.
3. Government of Canada, http://can-am.gc.ca/relations/commercial_relations_commerciales.
aspx?lang=eng. The reference here is to the previous bilateral agreement between the US and
Canada which lasted between 1989 and 1994.
4. Brownell, supra.
5. Brownell, supra.
6. The White House, ‘Trade deals that work for all Americans’, https://www.whitehouse.gov/
trade-deals-working-all-americans.
7. US Trade Representative, ‘Top trading partners – Dec 2016’, https://ustr.gov/countriesregions/
americas/canada; and The United States Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/
foreign-trade/statistics/highlights/toppartners.html.
8. Government of Canada, http://can-am.gc.ca/relations/commercial_relations_commerciales.
aspx?lang=eng.
9. Centre for Policy Studies, Victoria University, http://www.copsmodels.com/pdf/canada_
trade_2013.pdf.
10. Reuters, ‘Canada says TPP trade deal dead without United States’, http://uk.reuters.com/
article/us-usa-trump-trade-canada-idUKKBN1582P3.
11. See Amelia Hadfield (2017) ‘Maple leaf zeitgeist? Assessing Canadian Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau’s policy changes’, The Round Table, 106, pp. 23–35, http://www.tandfonline.com/
doi/full/10.1080/00358533.2016.1272954.
12. Robert Fife and Adrian Morrow, ‘Trump vows to only tweak Canadian NAFTA provisions
after Trudeau meeting’, The Globe and Mail, 13 February 2017, http://www.theglobeandmail.
com/news/politics/trudeau-trump-sit-down-in-oval-office-for-first-face-to-face-meeting/
article33998164/.