Buy America Act

[laughs] You should control find and see.

I hope it's in the Buy America Act.

[laughs]

Like, it lists all those items.

Okay.

Well, the honest truth is that the provision in the Buy America legislation doesn't give me much confidence that it won't be applied in a bad protectionist manner for the Buy America provision.

So just having the provision in there doesn't do a whole lot.

However, it may guide state actors in the decisions that they make.

And we can improve Bill C-6 if there's a clear statement that the bill will be interpreted consistently with Canada's international obligations.

We don't have that in the bill, and what's ironic is we required through negotiation with the Americans to have a similar provision in their Buy America legislation that the Buy America legislation would not be used for bad protectionism.

So we actually have a precedent that we can borrow from our friends to the south.

If the bill included clear rules on what factors will go into the determination of whether a good is a danger to human health and safety.

That includes governors in Mexico, I should add.

As ambassador, his files ranged from the Detroit-Windsor Bridge and beyond the border to Keystone XL, Buy America, security, and the everyday management of what remains Canada's most consequence- consequential international relationship.

Gary continues to advise on Canada-US relations, including recently advising the Manitoba government on its response to the US trade measures.

David Jacobson served as President Barack Obama's Ambassador to Canada from 2009 until 2013.

A Chicago lawyer before joining government, David worked in the Obama, uh, gov- presidential transition and in the White House before coming to Ottawa.

During his ambassadorship, Canada and the United States negotiated the Beyond the Border initiative, worked through Buy America disputes, and sought to make the border simultaneously more secure and more efficient.

Together, David and Gary worked through many of the same problems from their respective embassies, and that seems especially relevant today.

Canada-US relations are now at perhaps their most difficult point in generations.

I don't remember the same uproar and upheaval among the general Canadian population during the 2009 economic downturn when Barack Obama.

Obama imposed a Buy America regime in the trade world.

We had NAFTA then, as far as I can recall.

So maybe that didn't exactly abide by everything in NAFTA, but nobody went crazy over that.

In fact, the people that were able to mitigate that were business people who went around their governments and actually got businesses in the U.S. to lobby their government and got things changed so that many Canadian products were included in the Buy America list.

So this is not new, this is not different, but what is different is the response of people, the hysteria.

I think his characterization was actually fairly accurate.

So, I mean, the dollar, and I find it interesting because actually, of course, that means the U.S. dollar buys more, but they're not really interested in buying more from Canada.