Trade and Sustainability

The environment and free trade debate emerged as a prominent public policy and business issue between Canada and the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. A Canada-US free trade agreement was signed on January 2, 1988 with implementation to take place in January 1989. In the early 1990s debate focused on a trilateral agreement between Canada, the United States and Mexico. This initiative led to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), an agreement which came into force January 1, 1994. Two side agreements, one on Labour and the other on Environmental Co-operation accompanied this agreement.

Full details on the chronology of the two trade agreements between 1981 and 1994 are provided in the attached tables.

For a detailed discussion about NAFTA see:

Gale, Robert (1995) "NAFTA and its implications for Resource and Environmental Management", pp. 99-127 in Bruce Mitchell (Ed.) Resource and Environmental Management in Canada, Oxford University Press, Toronto.

Environment and Trade
(PDF: Click here to download Acrobat PDF Reader)