The Canada-US trade relationship lost its greatest champion when former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was laid to rest in Montreal on Saturday.
Mulroney was the architect of the original Canada-US free trade deal, which he and President Ronald Reagan signed in 1988. He negotiated the NAFTA agreement, which extended the arrangement to Mexico, although it was signed by Prime Minister Jean Chretien and President Bill Clinton in 1994. Then, after the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, who threatened to tear up the deal, Mulroney played a key behind-the-scenes role in helping keep the negotiations between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Trump’s team from going off the rails.
In an interview last year for a forthcoming book, Mulroney spoke about the importance of the efforts he and Trudeau made to save the trade relationship: “Had it collapsed, the economic backbone of Canada would have collapsed, because today, NAFTA is a grouping of three countries, and 500 million people, which represents seven percent of the world's population, and it generates 28 percent of the entire wealth of the world every single year, and the millions of jobs that goes with it.”
The relationship will be in jeopardy again if Trump wins in November. Trump has promised to impose a 10% tariff on all imports to the US.
To prepare for that eventuality, dozens of Canadian diplomats descended on Washington this week to meet with American lawmakers. Nobody knows what a re-elected Trump would do about trade with Canada, and he has other things on his mind.