Phantom Phone Call

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have unleashed anti-NAFTA rhetoric in their battle for votes in Ohio. Apparently, union workers in Ohio still feel threatened by NAFTA and this is a good way to rally those voters to your banner -- in a way that is not as effective in other states.

Now, for the past two days or so, there have been rumors circulating that Obama's campaign has made quiet calls to the Canadian government assuring officials there that Obama is simply engaging in campaign rhetoric and that an Obama administration would not seek to withdraw or substantially alter NAFTA or the close free trade relationship between the U.S. and Canada. The Obama campaign tepidly dismissed the rumors as "inaccurate."

One apparent source of the rumors, Talking Points Memo, responded to the campaign's dismissal by revealing its sources. It seems the call was made by senior Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee, who now denies making the call completely and has clammed up. Canada TV, however, is standing by its claim that Goolsbee did make the call, but has not identified who within the Canadian consulate in Chicago it was that Goolsbee spoke to -- and even says that it got confirmation of the call by sources at "the highest levels of Canadian government". Which is weird; "highest levels" sounds like the Prime Minister's office, and would hardly be the consulate in Chicago, which is where the call was allegedly made. But now, more appropriate Canadian government sources are denying this as well.

So, some have pounced on the story as "proof" that Obama is just another double-talking politician, one who says one thing and will govern in a different way if elected. And part of that is based on the widespread knowledge that it would be extraordinarily difficult and costly for any President to really seek to revise NAFTA, probably to the point that it wouldn't be worth actually pursuing that policy. So it would make sense in a way that Obama might not want to spike his international relations with Canada for a very short-term political advantage.

But wait a minute. Obama has never been an advocate of free trade. He's very much a "fair trader," and has been for most of his political career. In my investigation of Obama's policy platform, I found that he was generally opposed to free trade proposals:

Strongly opposed to CAFTA. Critical of farm subsidies for large corporations but not for "family farmers." Recent rhetoric ("People don't want a cheaper T-shirt if they're losing a job in the process") suggests a strong protectionist streak, and insists that Doha Round of GATT negotiations must produce "tangible benefits" for U.S. workers, but also claims loyalty to existing trade agreements. Would amend NAFTA to allow for labor agreements, and would advocate for greater human rights and opening of trade in China -- but shrinks from a trade war with the PRC.

I gave Obama only one in five available points on this issue, because my take on the issue is that regardless of local or industry-specific shakeouts, international trade is to the overall economic benefit of the U.S. in direct proportion to the freeness of that trade. I disapprove of the crypto-protectionism Obama has been preaching recently. Nevertheless, Obama has hardly changed his political position in Ohio -- if there was double-talk going on, it would have been in the phantom phone call to the Canadian government by Obama's aide.

The Canadian government is neither stupid, ignorant, nor selfless. It will look to its own advantage in responding to this. The Canadians have denied, in a big way that seems to go all the way to the PM's office, that such a call took place. That's a pretty hard line. What, then, is the advantage to the Canadian government in doing that? Prime Minister Harper's Conservative party is the only one of the four major parties in Canada to be publicly pro-NAFTA.* Harper would seem, then, to want to reassure his own constituency that he is protecting Canada's position within NAFTA by actually having this phone call with the likely new President of the U.S. Denying that the phone call took place is saying to Canadian voters that Harper's people are not having these kinds of conversations with American leaders; presumably, Canadian Tories would want that conversation to have taken place, unless they are more ambivalent about NAFTA than I am giving them credit for being.

So I've become skeptical of the report rather than of the denials of the phone call. Obama is sticking to his guns in being critical of free trade agreements. In Texas, a generally more pro-NAFTA state than Ohio, Obama has been sidestepping the issue. He's been consistent. If the phone call was made by this advisor (a guy who would be looking at a high-level economic position in the Obama Administration, like Secretary of Treasury or Director of the OMB), it would have been significantly out of step with the candidate's basic ideas about the issue (however futile they might be in practice). It wouldn't make sense for the call to have been made in the first place, and it wouldn't make sense for the Canadians to deny that it took place after it did.

What I can't figure out is why the denial would have to come from so high a source in the Canadian government. The whole incident doesn't strike me as particularly important enough to have even merited the attention of the Prime Minister (or, more realistically, his top aides within his office). The call was allegedly made to the Chicago consulate, which isn't even the primary embassy in the U.S. Why would someone in Ottawa have even bothered with this sort of thing?


* I don't claim to be fluent in Canadian politics. It's fairly easy to point out that Harper's Conservative Party has a thin plurality in Parliament and seems to have formed a coalition government with the Bloc Québécois. A quick scan of Canadian news sources suggests to me that of the four major parties in Canada, the Tories are the most pro-NAFTA and the opposition Liberal and New Democrat Parties who are generally anti-NAFTA. I have not been able to get any kind of a read at all about what the Bloc Québécois thinks of NAFTA, but if the BQ is the junior partner in the government, it must have found a way to reconcile its own ideology with that of the Tories. Canadians, please comment and tell me if I'm wrong about any of this.