Mexico won't ratify USMCA with US tariffs still in place - Polidicks

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/mexico-pushing-labour-reform-wont-ratify-new-nafta-with-u-s-tariffs-in-place OTTAWA -— Mexico’s Congress will be asked to approve a major labour-reform bill this spring as a necessary step to ratifying the new North American free-trade pact later this autumn, say Mexican officials. But unless the Trump administration lifts the punishing tariffs it has imposed on Mexican steel and aluminum imports — duties it also imposed on Canada — Mexico is prepared to keep the status quo with the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement. The push to improve workers’ rights in Mexico was a key priority for Canada and the United States during the rocky NAFTA renegotiation because they wanted to level the playing field between their workers and lower-paid Mexican workers, especially in the auto sector. U.S. President Donald Trump imposed tariffs of 25 per cent on steel and 10 per cent on aluminum from Mexico and Canada, using the controversial national-security clause in U.S. trade law — “Section 232,” as it’s called in shorthand — that both countries say was illegal.

Canada doesn't want to, either. And Canada is unlikely to ratify NAFTA 2.0 this year even if things are all straightened out, as the federal election means there're only like 50 actual session days for the federal government to conduct business and it's got more important things to do with those precious few days than agree to a worse trade deal. Also there's been some ratfucking going on with the trade agreement text. When the three national leaders signed the trade agreement together last year, that was supposed to be the end of changes to the agreement. Edits for spelling mistakes are allowed, but the material text of the agreement is not supposed to change once the three nations signed off on it together. But when the official text was posted, several material changes were inserted, and not coincidentally they either added new concessions from Can/Mex to the US for the US' exclusive benefit or loopholed the US out of things it didn't like. The one that springs to mind and pisses me off greatly is, Canada strongarmed the USA into accepting a trade clause that specified that the government will take adequate steps to protect all workers from discrimination based on age, gender, gender identity, race, and a few other human-rightsy categories. The updated text added a footnote to this line that essentially says "nothing needs to be done because the US is already doing enough to satisfy this requirement" even though the USA is manifestly fucking not. The fact that Trump hustled Canada and the US into signing the agreement as fast as possible, before the outgoing Mexican president left office, and then just seemed to forget about the aluminum and steel tariffs that'd been put in place to force us to sign is peak Art of the Deal.

Trump is literally trying to scam our closest allies because that's how he makes deals, fucking pitiful.

please, everybody, put pressure on the US dont let trump's bullshit fly. ask for a better deal or just start shafting trump until a better deal is forced out of him.

with the senate still requiring a 2/3rds body to ratify you'd have thought they would have let the democrats into the negotiations, otherwise nafta 2.0 was DOA

Trump wanted to try and hustle Congress into signing it and wrapping it all up before the end of the year because he wants everything now now now. Not even Mitch McConnell was prepared to move that fast -- and then Trump deliberately caused the longest shutdown in US history.

I think these kinds of trade deals can't even be solely implemented by the senate and the executive since they require translating the text of the treaty into domestic law and regulations so much like any bill the treaty instructs congress as to what to do but they have to then enact it through US law and statutes under a process laid out in various US laws