Bill Clinton: “Well, the trade agreement we have with Canada is--it is an extension of it, but what we did with Canada was to basically…”

“Well, the trade agreement we have with Canada is--it is an extension of it, but what we did with Canada was to basically take more and more of our trade and put it into a free trade zone, that is, we took quotas off, we lowered tariffs. But Canada and the United States are both quite well-developed countries. So the main benefit that we got out of the Canada-U.S. trade agreement is we got to sell more of the things that we were really good at producing or had a low cost advantage in, they got to sell more of what they were good at producing or had a low cost advantage in, so that we essentially got to play to our strengths. And the volume in trade in both countries went way up. Our trade with Canada is more or less in balance. But even when trade is in balance, it can be a great benefit to both countries if, by putting it in balance, it grows faster than your economy would have grown otherwise. In other words, if we added more economic growth and they added more economic growth, we both came out ahead. And that's been the primary benefit there. In the case of Mexico, because they're at a different point in their development, in all probability we will continue to have a trade surplus with them, and they will get an investment advantage from us in the rest of their country. So I do think that the two countries are not too analogous now. I think 30 years from now they will be. But I think in the meanwhile--let me just say, the people in Mexico who are not for this deal, and there are people in Mexico who are not for it, they're not for it because they think that they're giving us a permanent trade surplus with them in return for having access to our capital, because Mexicans like American products so much. So there will be a difference there. In other words, they can't possibly quite enter into the same relationship with us that Canada did because they're not capable, their economy's not big enough or diverse enough yet. The Mexican economy, even though 90 million people live there, is about the size of the California economy from Los Angeles to the Mexican border. That's about how big it is, about one-twentieth the American economy.”