There was an excellent article by Barrie McKenna in the Globe on February 9, 2014, pointing out the importance of the Obama administration getting trade negotiating authority from the Congress, called Trade Promotion Authority or “TPA”. That authority expired in 2002 and hasn’t been renewed. A new TPA bill has been introduced in both the… Read More »

The problem when you have a Canadian Trade Minister like Ed Fast inundating us with press releases all the time is that, when something really noteworthy is issued, it tends to get less attention than it merits. This may be true of a couple of highly significant reports the Trade Department recently issued, which have… Read More »

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (or TPP) trade negotiations, the biggest floating trade game on the planet, will be re-engaging in earnest this year, having missed their 2013 deadline, an impossible goal to begin with. Should the talks succeed, Canada and all TPP participants will gain from the effects of reduced barriers and other market-opening measures, especially… Read More »

This past year saw dramatic developments for Canada on the trade front, by far the most prominent being the conclusion of negotiations with the European Union on a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). Lots of fanfare last October in Brussels as the PM and EU President Barroso announced this milestone deal. This was followed… Read More »

One of the main features of the Canada-Europe trade agreement or “CETA”, announced in October, will be incorporation of the Most-Favoured-Nation (MFN) treatment rule. MFN is a pillar of the international trading system under the WTO Agreement. It means you can’t discriminate among WTO member countries in your trading arrangements. You have to give exporters… Read More »

The information material the Feds have been issuing on the benefits of CETA is pretty good and quite informative, particularly on things like CETA’s tariff rate reductions in key industrial and agri-food sectors. There are clear gains in the manufactured goods – including in advanced manufacturing – and processed foods sectors. In some other areas,… Read More »

While it’s too early to really know how each side (Ottawa and Brussels) will move toward implementing and ratifying the CETA – after all, we don’t even have the text of the treaty yet – there are some interesting scenarios that can be discussed. One scenario concers provisional implementation of the CETA. Can this be done before… Read More »

Now that we have an agreement in principle for the CETA, announced with great fanfare on 18 October 2013, but no actual agreement, the question is: what are the next steps? Here is a primer on how it will work. FIRST, we DO need to have the actual text, a process that will take several… Read More »

The fallout from the clothing factory collapse in Bangladesh – which caught media attention for a while – has subsided. However, it has left western industries scrambling for a solution and for very real and effective safeguards against this thing happening again. There’s commercial self-interest involved, sure. Companies can’t afford the public opprobrium in ther… Read More »

Joe Oliver, Minister of Natural Resources, fired a shot across the European bow last May over the possible enactment of the proposed EU Fuel Quality Directive (FDQ), saying that if it’s passed, Canada could march the Europeans to the World Trade Organisation. This came at a delicate time, as Canadian and European negotiators are trying… Read More »