Farmscape for May 7, 2018

Manitoba's Premier says the benefits created on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border by the North American Free Trade Agreement are no longer being taken for granted.
Manitoba's Premier concluded a visit Friday to New York where he took part in meetings to promote Manitoba and draw attention to the positive direction in which the province is going.
Brian Pallister says Canada's trading relationship with the U.S. and theirs with is the strongest of any two nations in the world but sometimes in life we are guilty of taking our blessings for granted.

Clip-Brian Pallister-Premier Manitoba:
I think for many people, frankly in the business sector for example, felt pretty happy with the way things were.
In Manitoba and across Canada we benefitted from the NFATA, not only the NAFTA terms for trade but also from dispute resolution mechanisms that were there and things that gave stability to our relationship.
Let's face it the U.S. is an enormous economy and tremendously strong and so you need rules and we had rules that gave structure to our trading relationship.
We need those rules and we need rules going forward.
Sure there's some tweaking that needs to be done, there's naturally some updating, there's some chapters that have parts of them that need to be rewritten or added to.
We accept that.
But, what's happened in the last few months is that people who perhaps were a little bit unappreciative of this trading relationship are starting to understand how important it is, on both sides of the border.
You're getting American people speaking up in places like Wisconsin and Minnesota where they really have economic benefits and jobs created by Canadians.
And vice versa we have benefitted from a lot of the work that people in the United States have done in terms of our imports.
Manitoba does import a lot of goods from the United States as well.
Again, the relationship that we may have taken for granted in the past is in most places not being taken for granted now.

Pallister says that's important because Manitoba is a trading province.
He says these negotiations matter and this topic has been raised at virtually meeting he has attended.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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