After bitter discussions to renegotiate the trade agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico, the TMEC, which came into force amid the pandemic, is far from having ended the trade frictions between the three countries.
But it could, under the leadership of the Joe Biden government, change the situation in terms of labor law.
The Mexico-United States-Canada Treaty (TMEC) will celebrate its first year of existence on Thursday. On July 1, 2020, it replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that had been in force since 1994, at the behest of the Donald Trump administration.
All three partners always said that this new treaty would be beneficial to their economies and their workers. But over the past year, the range of litigation has widened between the United States and Canada on the one hand, and the United States and Mexico on the other.
Certainly, the TMEC removed a “cloud of uncertainties” and thus improved the business climate, a sine qua non condition for promoting trade and investment, stresses Jeffrey Schott, an expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics think tank.
But, paradoxically, it favored the emergence of numerous conflicts.
“NAFTA was the vision of a single North American market that would gradually become more and more integrated, a bit in the image of the European Union, although without going as far as the EU,” recalls Edward Alden, an expert at the Council on Relations. Exteriors.
“The TMEC set the rules for the three different North American economies to cooperate where they can, while setting rules to fight where they can’t,” he added.
Therefore, there will be an increase in the number of litigation in the coming years, because with “the framework of these rules, (the countries) will act according to their own interests, quite aggressively,” he estimated.
