It’s time for London businesses to look into the finer details of the new trade agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Canada, according to the head of the London Chamber of Commerce.
“This is a perfect time, a perfect opportunity, for businesses right across London and right across Canada to dig in, find out how it’s going to impact their sector, and start budgeting,” Gerry Macartney told 980 CFPL’s The Craig Needles Show.
Macartney hails keeping Chapter 19, which gives each country the right to challenge anti-dumping and countervailing duty decisions, as a win.
“It gives us some recourse if there’s any dispute down the road. There’s a formal mechanism in place to review things like rules of origin, all the environmental issues that go along with that, labour issues that go along with that,” he said.
“They wanted to throw it out. We didn’t. We won. They lost.”
WATCH: Doug Ford, Jim Wilson say federal government ‘threw Ontario farmers under the bus’ in USMCA deal
Macartney also said it would be impossible to reach a deal where one party gets everything they want.
“You know what they say about negotiated deals. If nobody likes all of it, then you’ve probably got a good deal.”
Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer released a joint statement Sunday night announcing the new deal, dubbed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
Henry Wydeven, who sits on the Dairy Farmers of Ontario board, is disappointed Canada has given away more of its dairy market and that the deal squashes Class 7.
“It’s basically milk protein concentrate, milk protein isolates, that were being dumped into our country by a very highly subsidized American market,” said Wydeven.
By legally putting Class 7 into place, dairy farmers were allowed to start making those products — which go into things like yogurt and cheese — themselves.
“Now we’ve been thrown under the bus.”