Leveling Canada’s Playing Field

Like Americans, Canadians will be going to the polls later this year. When they do, chances are that the biggest issue on their minds will be a treaty with the U.S. that most Americans have never heard of. Maybe they should.

On January 2, 1988, President Reagan scribbled his signature on a twelve-hundred-page trade agreement that, in his usual style, he proclaimed to be “good for Canada and good for the United States.” Meanwhile, in Ottawa, Canada’s Conservative prime minister assured his fellow Canadians that this was a great historic occasion.

For Canadians, it certainly was. The Canada-U.S. Trade Agreement of 1988 represents the most drastic surrender of Canada’s economic sovereignty to a foreign ...