The White House defended the North American Free Trade Agreement on Wednesday in response to Donald Trump’s vow to force Canada and Mexico to renegotiate NAFTA as part of a plan to boost U.S. job growth.
The United States has already re-negotiated NAFTA to improve labor and environmental standards during the talks on the Trans Pacific Partnership, or TPP, presidential press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters traveling with President Obama to Ottawa for the North American Leaders Summit.
The participants are known as the “three amigos,” the leaders of the three NAFTA signatories: the United States, Mexico and Canada.
Earnest said the TPP includes enforceable labor and environmental provisions. And while he said there’s no denying the negative impact on “a number of U.S. workers and U.S. communities” from globalization, Earnest said the real challenge is what the U.S. should do about it.
“Are you just going to bemoan the impact of globalization on the U.S. economy, on some U.S. workers and on some U.S. communities? Or are you actually going to do something about it?” he asked.
Obama, he said, has actually done something about the problems with NAFTA by negotiating the TPP with several countries in the Asia Pacific, but also Canada and Mexico, among others.
“So the president promised in 2007 and 2008 — this got a lot of attention — that he would work, that he would engage with our partners to make changes to those agreements to make them more fair to U.S. workers and the broader U.S. economy,” he said. “That’s exactly what we’ve succeeded in doing.”
Trump on Tuesday criticized NAFTA as a U.S. job killer and said he would scrap the deal if Canada and Mexico were unwilling to overhaul it.
He also said he would pull the United States out of negotiations over the TPP pact.
