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If those groups refused to support him, Mulroney said he would move ahead anyway, letting Canadians decide, as he did over the matter of the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement in 1988, “whether they support me or they support these other characters, because you can only have one Prime Minister at a time.”

“I’d take my lumps with the electorate, but I’ll bet you a dollar to a doughnut if this is properly laid out they’ll vote for this just as powerfully as they voted for free trade,” he said.

Critics of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement went to “bizarre lengths” in the 1988 federal election to scare Canadians into believing the “sky would fall” under free trade, Mulroney said. Instead, trade volumes have more than tripled in less than 25 years, from $235 billion in 1989 to $881 billion today, he said.

The U.S. has also done “extremely well” out of the deal, he added.

“A country that has an unemployment rate of 3.8 per cent, the lowest of any industrialized country in the world, cannot seriously argue that it has done poorly in its international agreements,” he said.

A country with an unemployment rate of 3.8%, the lowest of any industrialized country, cannot seriously argue it has done poorly in international agreements former prime minister Brian Mulroney

Mulroney praised the new U.S.-Mexico Canada Agreement for modernizing NAFTA, maintaining the Chapter 19 dispute settlement mechanism and making compromises on rules of origin in the automotive sector “which really cost Mexico but didn’t hurt Canada or the United States.” The new deal increases the amount of parts and raw materials in a vehicle that must come from American or Mexican sources and raises the percentage of production to be done by workers earning at least US$16 an hour.