Frank E said:
Eh, Canada is going through some troubles in dealing with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) re-negotiations with the Trump administration.
These trade agreements are very complex (similar to Brexit's re-negotiation with other European nations), and I'm not sure the Trudeau administration has the guns to be very effective in our negotiations, both from a personnel and economics perspective.
The issue here isn't one of complexity. It's an issue of a lack of any sort of unifying trade policy on one hand and the very real problem of governing without a mandate on the other. The Canada-EU trade deal was more complex than either negotiation and that got handled fine by Trudeau and his team.
NAFTA negotiations are being complicated because the person running the US economy seems to barely have a 4th graders understanding of economic policy beyond selling branded ties at JC penny and can't decide if he wants a trade policy based on neoliberal crony capitalism like his party wants or the faux-populist protectionism he ran on.
Meanwhile Brexit, which isn't really a trade deal, is the result of having a dubious mandate for a massive change in any number of national policies(the result of putting an incredibly complex decision like leaving the EU as a strict yes or no question) while having no real mandate to govern the actual country after the near disaster of May's short election call. "Brexit" is barely a decision, let alone a coherent policy for extricating one country from the tangled web of EU policy. Leaving the EU was sold on the obviously faulty idea that the Tories could negotiate a favourable deal while not having the option of walking away from the negotiations while the EU, which has a vested interest in keeping their coalition together, has no real incentive to offer the UK favourable terms.
The world had 20 years where the right wing parties of the world(Conservatives, Republicans, Conservatives) and the Centre-Right parties(Liberals, Democrats, Labour) were virtually identical in economic policy and deals were easy to make. Now you have a situation where the remnants of that failed movement, one in which moving jobs away from developed nations and concentrating wealth in the hands of a select few, shockingly, didn't end up great for the working class in those developed nations, are trying to negotiate with the Clown Show that has grown out of right-wing resentment out of realizing the people they voted for have been tying their shoes together and then asking them to race.
Complexity is not the issue. The issue is that the only two voices at the table are the people holding onto a dead dream of globalization working for everyone and those who bring nothing to the table outside of shouting rank economic illiteracy at the top of their lungs.
