Welcome to Canada - USA Dialogue
Welcome to Canada - USA Dialogue. I am your host, a lifelong resident of Washington State, who has posted on others' blogs but am starting up my own.
Somehow, in the process of living in the northwest portion of Washington, I have accumulated a wealth of knowledge and interest in our Canadian neighbours. My goal here is to engage in intelligent, critical dialogue.
Further your affiant sayeth naught. WELCOME
Somehow, in the process of living in the northwest portion of Washington, I have accumulated a wealth of knowledge and interest in our Canadian neighbours. My goal here is to engage in intelligent, critical dialogue.
Further your affiant sayeth naught. WELCOME
Comments
1) What is with this??? I'm not understanding why the tariffs are there in the first place, and what is it going to take for them to go away?
2) What's the point of a trade agreement if a country is only going to honor pieces of it, and not all of it?
3) This has been ongoing for some time, and Alberta is coming under pressure to use energy (oil/gas) as a bargaining chip, which, of course, Alberta has NO INTEREST in doing! How do you see us fixing this?
My brief one-paragraph description is that the fine-print details of NAFTA and of U.S. trade law give special interest groups the ability to push Uncle Sam into trade disputes.
In a nutshell, when trade legislation is passed by Congress and signed into law by the President (two separate branches of government), U.S. laws provide various procedures for "aggrieved parties" to pursue administrative complaints against foreign countries around alleged trade disputes.
Well-organized special interest groups can initiate these little-known challenges through a U.S. Department of Commerce panel called the "International Trade Commission". There are many legal specialists and international-trade specialists inside the Beltway who work full-time on behalf of special-interest groups to initiate trade disputes in this manner.
I fully intend for more discussion on this topic, as it is one of the paradoxes of American Federal government.
One of the interesting things that came out of the First Ministers meeting (or whatever they're calling it these days) is a "National Energy Strategy" committee to deal with our energy needs and exports. This is to countermand an (expected) push from Ottawa to somehow make AB & other oil-producing provinces sell oil internally at below market values (the National Energy Policy of the late 70s/early 80s that killed the AB economy dead).
Things should be pretty interesting on this side of the border in the next little while...