Canada Wants a New NAFTA to Include Gender and Indigenous Rights
Canada’s idea of a fair trade deal seems very different from President Trump’s.
Just two days before heading into the first round of negotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finally laid out its core objectives, and second on the list was to make the 23-year-old pact “more progressive.”
By that, the government meant not only strengthening the existing labor safeguards and environmental provisions, but also adding whole new chapters on both gender and indigenous rights, and addressing climate change.
Those “progressive elements,” the foreign affairs minister, Chrystia Freeland, told a university audience in Ottawa on Monday morning, “are how we guarantee that the modernized Nafta will not only be an exemplary free-trade deal, it will also be a fair trade deal.” . .