Live on C-SPAN: Laura Dawson and Duncan Wood on NAFTA and North American Relations

Laura Dawson, Director of the Wilson Center's Canada Institute, and Duncan Wood, Director of the Wilson Center's Mexico institute, sat down with C-SPAN to discuss the ongoing NAFTA renegotiation and relations between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. 

WATCH HERE.

Selected Quotes

Laura Dawson

• “Negotiators have been very clear since the beginning that this has to be a better deal when they leave than when they started. They can’t take any shortcuts. They can’t say, ‘Hey, we got a great deal on auto. Sorry about your luck farmers, we’ll talk about you next time.'”
• "As the president says, 'We're going to cut off those Canadian cars,' [but] there ain't no such thing as a Canadian car. When you're cutting off that car, that's a Ford vehicle, and all of a sudden you can't get minivans from Ford in the United States anymore because Canada makes the vans, and the U.S. makes different models, and Mexico makes different models."

Duncan Wood

• “If we just focus on trade figures, it belies the reality of the North American economy today, which is that this is a deeply integrated economy and you cannot separate them out. That’s why a bilateral deal just doesn’t make any sense. A bilateral deal between Mexico and the United States, excluding Canada, means that you are ignoring the reality of integrated production systems across the region.”
• "We tend to forget about the consumer in all of this. Consumers save billions of dollars every year because of these integrated manufacturing systems. As the conversation is developing over China and tariffs with China, we're looking at prices for consumer goods going up."