i've been over this with nafta polling before: nobody's ever opposed the idea of a trade agreement with the united states, what's always been contentious are certain aspects of it. you have to get really modular in your polling if you want to get a handle on what people are thinking about this. you want to see the trees here, not the forest; these vague questions just obscure the point.

i was too young to be actively engaged in the debate. but, i think that the liberals were both right to oppose it and right to sign it - and i think that most of the ways they criticized the deal have proven astute and poignant, and overwhelmingly correct.


remember: the liberal position was never against reciprocity (it was their idea...), but against certain components of the deal that were seen as surrendering sovereignty. what happened, of course, is that the ndp performed very well under broadbent and the party split the vote; polls in the 80s were not aligned with the conservative position, but split between the liberal position (necessarily trade, but not necessarily nafta) and the ndp position (no trade deal at all).

i certainly hope the party approaches renegotiating the deal with the same broad mindset it had in 1988, with an attempt to try and fix some of the problems they had to let get away at the time. again: their criticisms of the deal have proven astute, poignant and overwhelmingly correct. there's the part on chapter 11, for example: i'm not convinced that a turner or chretien government would have been able to overcome opposition in their own party to sign a deal with that in it. and, it has caused serious damage in canada. we would be far better off without that chapter. it probably wasn't worth cancelling the deal over, though. freeland included that in her list of demands, and you just wouldn't see that kind of language coming from a conservative government because they've never opposed it.

on the other hand, democrats and republicans say basically the same thing on trade; you could take statements by bush and obama and throw them in a hat and mix them up and legitimately not know who said what, except maybe through hints in sophistication of language. and, obama ran and won on the same buy america provisions that trump ran and won on, too.

granted: in the end, the liberals may end up sounding like the conservatives on trade. more precise polling would demonstrate that this will be a liability for them. but, if the older voices in the party win out, the canadian position on certain things may even be (perhaps pleasantly) unrecognizable to even well-informed canadians. as the american trade people have up to this point done essentially all of their trade negotiations with conservatives, they may not see this coming, or even be aware of these differences, and we may catch them off guard on certain points that the conservatives have never opposed, or bring issues to the table that the conservatives never brought to the table.

the liberals should know that people are going to be paying attention, and are going to want to see the liberals demonstrate that they are not just the same thing as conservatives, on trade. this is a substantive voting issue. and, the party has an opportunity to finally define itself properly, on it, by drawing attention to the differences, which is what it should be doing, at least domestically.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/grenier-nafta-talks-polls-1.4247820