The General Manager of Manitoba Pork says the modernized free trade agreement reached by Canada, the United States and Mexico this week, will provide much needed certainty for the Canadian and American pork sectors.
On Sunday after more than a year of negotiations, Canada, Mexico and the United States agreed to move forward with a new North American Free Trade Agreement, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
Andrew Dickson, the General Manager of Manitoba Pork, says analysts are just starting to get their heads around the finer details but overall the agreement will be good for the pork sector.
One of the key points that Canada pushed hard on was this dispute resolution mechanism and ensuring that that stayed in place. This is very important for both Mexico and Canada that we would have a trilateral body which would adjudicate disputes over actions taken in any one of the countries, the United States negotiating to have the whole thing revoked.
We were not very happy about that idea because it would encourage potential trade cases by various groups in the United States who thought they might have a more sympathetic audience or judges if it was just done in U.S. trade courts but the U.S. at the end of the day backed off. We’ve fixed that up and put it in place.
Also indicating that the agreement is going to be good for 16 years, that also brings some certainty to the market place. In other words we won’t have another round of trade negotiations every five years where everybody has big arguments and retaliatory measures are taken by one party against another over some issue and we get sucked into this thing.
~ Andrew Dickson, Manitoba Pork
Dickson congratulates the federal government. He acknowledges, as in all agreements, some people aren’t happy and some people are happy but on balance the federal government has done a good job in positioning Canada in a good place through this deal.
