Demorest Law Firm is a member of the International Society of Primerus Law Firms, an international network of smaller law firms. Stewart & Stewart is our affiliated firm in Washington, DC, and they are experts in international trade issues. Terry Stewart of that firm graciously gave us permission to post his article.
The United States, Mexico, and Canada are neighbors and have experienced significant economic integration over recent years. The NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) came into effect in 1994 but has not been updated since that time to reflect the changing economic and business landscape, to address problems with the functioning of the existing agreement, or to otherwise update the agreement. While the U.S., Canada, and Mexico were parties to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, which addressed many of the update issues that have been identified for some time, the U.S. withdrew from the TPP last year. On September 30, 2018, the three North American neighbors signaled that a new agreement had been reached, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). If approved and implemented by the three governments and their legislatures, a new trade agreement could go into effect by the end of 2019 or in early 2020.
For the elected representatives in legislatures, for the business community (manufacturing, services, agriculture), labor, consumer and other groups, what is included or not within the new agreement is critical to both their evaluation of the merits of the new agreement and their likely support or opposition to the agreement’s adoption and implementation. Getting one’s hands around the new text and understanding changes from the existing NAFTA and from other more recent texts (e.g., TPP) helps all those with an interest in the importance, the successes, and the potential remaining gaps in the new text.
In a new trade flow, Terence Stewart, Managing Partner of Stewart and Stewart, reviews some of the major changes in the new agreement and announces the posting on the Stewart and Stewart webpage of side-by-side texts comparing the USMCA with the NAFTA and with the TPP (before US withdrawal). Thirteen of the 34 chapters of the USMCA are now posted, with more to be posted in the coming days. Mr. Stewart noted that “Our firm has periodically generated such side-by-side texts because of the great interest among trading partners, national legislatures, businesses, labor and various NGOs in understanding at the detail level what is new or different from existing agreements. I thank my colleagues for their hard work in generating these side-by-side documents. We hope the public will find them of use in the coming months as the new agreement is studied and debated.”
This article was written by Stewart and Stewart of Washington, DC.
