How Obama lost Canada

What’s more, by engaging in protectionism, Washington has violated the substance and spirit of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the trade bloc formed in 1994 among Canada, the United States, and Mexico. As a result, NAFTA, which was initially intended as a template for broader trade expansion by all three partners, has languished while each country has negotiated a spaghetti bowl of bilateral trade agreements with other countries. Trilateral economic summits among the NAFTA partners have become little more than photo-ops accompanied by bland communiqués. Bilateral meetings between U.S. and Canadian leaders, which were a regular feature of the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush eras, have also mostly fallen by the wayside. Meanwhile, the United States demanded upfront concessions from Canada as the price of entry to negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a regional free-trade group, while preserving massive agriculture subsidies of its own. The protracted wrangling over a seat at the table does not augur well for meaningful progress.