Martin Brian the Second

And another thing...Mulroney was asked by Braid whether USMCA was better than NAFTA. Well, beside congratulating the Liberal descendants of the Free Trade haters for their "great job" on that, the former PM (who architected the FTA with the US, and was called a traitor who was going to erase the US border by Bob Rae and John Turner for his pains) he could have said that, once again, "Trump was right". For surely there would have been no USMCA, with its higher auto worker and environmental standards for Mexico, without Trump.

But, in any case, it might also have done him good to admit that, lately, the FTA is not going well for us because we are not competitive with the Americans. This is especially true in the energy sector. While we discourage, forbid or downright assault our energy industry, they have let it bloom so that they are now the number one oil producer in the world on their way to being the number one exporter. They are poised to leave Paris while we continue to be committed to that arch jobkiller. As the US under Trump is less interested in being "pristine" than us and more interested in making money, they are leaving us in the dust economically.

Worse, all those worker adjustment programs that MBM promised with the coming of FTA and NAFTA never really materialized. Mulroney's dream of Free Trade only works if we can compete. So the best worker adjustment program we can bring in to cope is to do as much as possible the same way as the US. That is low taxes, open markets and lower regulation.  Maybe we can start on that before we make sure every BBQ in Canada is registered for Climate Change. To judge by USMCA alone, we should all be saying "thank you" not to those feckless, protectionist hypocrites, Freeland and Trudeau, for making Mulroney's vision breath again but Trump.