Round table on Canada‐US free trade: Is it time for round two? A virtual round table
Canada and the United States enjoy the most intense bilateral trade and investment relationship in the world. Geographic proximity, comparable consumer tastes and preferences, and similarity in business and other institutions have acted as powerful magnets drawing the two economies together. For Canada, the smaller of the two partners, the need to manage the relationship to its benefit has always been a major foreign policy preoccupation. The Canada‐US Free Trade Agreement has acted both to deepen integration between the two economies and to strengthen governance of the bilateral relationship. Ten years after its entry into force, however, new and old issues on the agenda suggest that the time may have come to consider the need for further bilateral efforts to remove barriers to trade and investment and to strengthen the basis for managing bilateral relations. To discuss the prospect for such negotiations, Canadian Foreign Policy invited Michael Hart, Simon Reisman professor of trade policy in Carleton's Norman Paterson School of International Affairs and a member of the team that negotiated the Canada‐US Free Trade Agreement, to organize a virtual roundtable devoted to these issues.