WASHINGTON, D.C.—It certainly looks like U.S. President Donald Trump has decided that whatever happens to the new NAFTA trade deal — an agreement that could govern the vast majority of Canada’s international trade — he wins.

If it gets ratified by Congress, he gets to say he successfully renegotiated NAFTA as he promised to do when he called it the “worst trade deal ever made.”

But if the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement or USMCA, as it’s called here, doesn’t pass through the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, he gets to hammer them for inaction as they’re trying to impeach him.

Republicans have been running TV ads for weeks attacking Democrats with just that message. Monday Trump called out the Democratic speaker who controls the House agenda: “It’s sitting on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. She’s incapable of moving it, it looks like.”

It seems that Democrats have noticed, and may be increasingly eager to turn it around: to pass the deal and point to it as evidence that they continue to do the important business of the nation — even to work with Trump — as they pursue impeachment.

At a town-hall meeting in Alexandria, Va. last week held specifically to discuss impeachment, Democratic Rep. Don Beyer cited it among a list of accomplishments he said showed a Congress that remains focused on business. “We are very likely, I think — well, I put it at 73 per cent that we will, our Democratic house, will ratify the new ‘NAFTA Two,’ the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, before the end of this year,” he told his constituents. “Which gives Donald Trump a win. We’re not going to hold back with good policy, because it happens to be a win for Donald Trump.”

On Monday, hours after Trump blamed Pelosi, she offered her own comments to reporters saying she and her caucus were pretty much ready to go, and pointed back at Trump, saying they’re just waiting on approval of some fine-tuning from Trump’s representative.

Democrats have been working to tweak the deal to, among other things, respond to concerns from the labour movement about the likelihood of labour standards in Mexico being enforced. Like Beyer, Pelosi said she expects a deal to be done by the end of the year, though allowed that it could be early next year.

International trade lawyer Daniel Ujczo with Dickinson Wright, said Democrats won’t want to let it slip too far into next year, because they don’t want Trump’s political football to be kicked around through the election campaign.

“You know, they’re just at the point where you’re either going to have a deal or you’re not. And so there really wasn’t much more to talk about,” he said. “So I think just from a practical perspective, it made sense that we would see this over the last few days. Politically, it’s important too, because the Democrats want to show that they’re not just sitting on USMCA while they’re trying to impeach the president.”

Ujczo says during the imminent U.S. Thanksgiving break, they will be gauging reaction from private-sector interests — from the labour movement about Mexico, and from progressives who want less restrictive pharmaceutical patents — before coming back to move to the next stage.

Mexico has already ratified the deal, and is eager to see it finalized. On Monday, Mexico’s president said he’s sending a letter to Pelosi urging her to pass the deal, Reuters reported.

Canada has held off ratification of the deal, saying it wants to move with the United States government on it. Though the deal would have huge an influence on the Canadian economy — according to the World Bank, 75 per cent of Canada’s exports go to the U.S., and 50 per cent of its imports come from the U.S. — it’s not exactly clear what the political wrangling in Congress means for Canadians. If ratification of the deal is delayed, the most likely scenario is that the existing NAFTA would remain in place indefinitely. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said when the new deal was first signed that it was, in his view, an improvement for Canada. But many Canadian critics prefer the old NAFTA, especially with its longer patent protections on pharmaceuticals in Canada.

Ujczo says he thinks the new deal could provide a “shot in the arm” for the Canadian economy by ending uncertainty and cementing preferred access to the U.S. market in an increasingly unstable global trade landscape.

Either way, preserving the status quo for a time obviously wouldn’t be a disaster for the Canadian economy.

Trump suggested Monday that Canada and Mexico might get fed up with waiting and walk away from the deal. That seems unlikely. There is some risk, though, that Trump himself could react to further delays into next year by trying to unilaterally cancel NAFTA. Trump being Trump, though, it seems more possible (if still unlikely) he could announce new tariffs on Canadian goods, as he did with steel and aluminum during the negotiation process. But it’s hard to see a scenario in which he’d view those countries as the antagonists he’d want to retaliate against.

The more attractive route for him throughout an election campaign is to paint the Democrats as the villains holding up a deal, all the more so if Democratic presidential contenders are still debating the merit of the deal.

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For that reason, it may be most likely a deal will get done through Congress, either by the end of this year or very early next year before the presidential primaries get underway. It’s what Trump says he wants. And what Democrats are saying they expect.

Of course, that may change thanks to Trump. “There may be a trade deal passed that he negotiated but that the Democrats can also take credit for,” Ucjzo says. “The president’s very good at the extremes, of either claiming all the credit or — claiming or blaming, right? He’s great at claiming or blaming. We haven’t seen him share credit yet. But it’s gonna be interesting to see how that plays out over the next few months.”

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