i am not sure we really need to be a signatory to cafta as our trade with the central american countries is largely limited to tourism and such. real trade could be routed easily enough through american subsidiaries if there was any real tarrif problems. as for nafta while i'm generally a free trade proponent i think canada got fairly royally reamed on the deal. something like 95% of canada us trade was tarrif free when we started talking. essentially what we wanted was a binding dispute settlement system to resolve our periodic problems. to put it mildly the us gov't has miserably failed to abide by the settlement mechanism in cases where it's ruled against them. saw some numbers on that and the decisions have been very lopsided in the canadian favour. in return the americans got to be treated like canadian consumers of energy and strategic minerals. according to nafta if there is a shortage of oil say we cannot simply say we will export whatever surplus we have after seeing to our own needs. if it was to be done over again i think mr mulroney would have gotten an opportunity to make history by being the first prime minister to go over niagara falls in an authentic birch bark canoe.

having lost what is basically the last possible appeal under nafta about softwood lumber the american lobby group who started the whole kerfuffle have decided to sue their own gov't over signing an "unconstitutional" treaty. just has to fill anyone thinking of signing a deal with the americans with full faith and confidence in their intent to live up to it. so far they have had their methodology for computing the tarrif amount dismissed as crocked, the fact that the tarrif was justifiable based on damage to the american producers was tossed, the attempt to distribute the illegally collected tarrif to american producers was ruled illegal and so on. the net upshot of it is that the canadian producers are now so much more efficient than their american counterparts (mostly) that they have very possibly doomed their own industry to mediocrity in their own country.

astoundingly the canadian gov't seems to possibly have grown a set. told the americans they need to either refund their illegally collected tarrif or stop collecting any more before we will talk to them about it again. heck the threat of retaliatory tarrifs was even mentioned. guess the americans dont want to wait for the wto thing to wind up. hmm could that be because they feel they will lose that too perhaps?