Anne McLellan of the University of Alberta:
... the treaty needs a revamp, she says, and should be expanded. The transition period where the three countries were losing jobs to each other is long over, and trade between the U.S. and Canada reached over a trillion dollars last year. Other trading blocks like India and China pose the real threat to jobs, and in order to be competitive with them, NAFTA must be expanded.
“We will either become three independent countries foraging for ourselves,” she says, “or we take NAFTA, with its faults, and we have the creativity and courage to say that there is something special about these three countries, that we have enough in common that, yes, is about trade, but is also about shared values.”
Elizabeth May of the Green Party:
May agrees that the trade agreement needs to be renegotiated, but far from wanting to expand it, May would scale back controversial sections like Chapter 11, which she says gives corporations too many rights.
“Canada has lost out,” she says, “sometimes in cases with millions of dollars at stake, for doing things that normally are within the jurisdiction of a Canadian government to do.”
See http://www.seemagazine.com/article/news/news-main/debate1127/
The U.S. political climate right now seems to favor scaling back rather than expanding, but if there is an initiative to open up NAFTA and re-think it, it's hard to know where this might lead. There may be a bit of both, with expansion in some areas and scaling back in others.
