Canada: a Good Result

The victory of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in the Canadian national elections has global consequences; it assures the ratification of the free-trade agreement with the United States. The world’s largest trading partnership will become a market without frontiers, and a model for other traders.

This was also a victory for President Reagan, whose leadership was crucial in overcoming extensive resistance within the United States as Congress moved to its own ratification. The agreement capped eight years of commitment by the President to freeing international commerce by tearing down some of the many barriers, tariff and non-tariff, that stifle world trade.

Inevitably this extraordinary agreement will give momentum to the meeting next month in Canada of world trade ministers, reviewing at midpoint the negotiations on a new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade for 1990. Just as the Canada-U.S. treaty removes barriers in agricultural trade, so the new GATT begins the process of establishing international farm-trade standards, as well as extending GATT rules to other areas previously not covered.

The implementation of the Canada-U.S. agreement will take place over the next decade. As the election results in Canada showed, and as the congressional debate in Washington confirmed, there will be a need for continued care, sensitivity and understanding. Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative Party won a majority of the seats in Parliament with a minority of the popular votes. Opposition to the trade agreement by the opposing parties was a major element of the election campaign. Canada has in this fashion demonstrated its misgivings and concerns, and they will be allayed only as the United States demonstrates respect for Canadian sovereignty and makes sure that the agreement is in practice an agreement between equals--not an assertion of American hegemony.

It is a good agreement. It removes virtually all of the barriers that remain in what has become a largely free trade relationship between these two prosperous nations. It addresses one of the most serious problems of the present trade relationship, providing a new means for resolving disputes, although only experience will tell whether the process established by the trade agreement is precise enough to be effective.

Mulroney now faces the task of healing the wounds of the election campaign. John Turner, who forced the election as the leader of the Liberals and made the trade agreement the central issue, raised all the dreadful specters of U.S. domination during the campaign. Mulroney insisted that the pact would preserve national identities on both sides of the border. So it does. But the bitterness of the debate will make it no easier for Canada to move ahead now with the implementation of the pact in an atmosphere poisoned by the shrillness of the anti-Americanism that characterized so much of the electoral fight.