Year-end deadline for new NAFTA looking impossible, trade experts say
OTTAWA — NAFTA negotiators appear to have adopted the lament of the White Rabbit: “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”
Battalions of negotiators for Canada, Mexico and the United States have been working at a breakneck pace trying to reach agreement on a revamped North American free trade pact by the end of the year but so far they have little to show for it.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer seemed to concede as much earlier this week when he offered an assessment of the progress thus far that could have come straight out of “Alice in Wonderland”:
“Yeah, well, we’re moving at warp speed but we don’t know whether we’re going to get to a conclusion, that’s the problem,” he told the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.