Morales participates in public/private sector working groups that advise the Mexican government during NAFTA negotiations.
“I personally believe that if we keep on pushing that agenda, we don’t need NAFTA talks,” he said. “Of course, it would be very fortunate to have a NAFTA agreement, but we don’t need NAFTA talks in order to do this.”
Signs indicate that NAFTA talks have slowed to a crawl, after the parties had aimed to strike an updated agreement earlier this spring.
Then, the Trump administration on June 1 lifted its exemption of Canada, Mexico and EU from global tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum, which were deemed necessary by the executive branch for national security reasons.
Furthermore, on Tuesday, National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow said on Fox News that President Donald Trump now prefers renegotiating NAFTA as two bilateral agreements with Canada and Mexico.
Trump’s “preference, now, and he asked me to convey this, is to negotiate with Mexico and Canada separately,” Kudlow said. “He prefers bilateral negotiations, and he’s now looking at two different countries: Canada is a much different country than Mexico. They have different problems.”
Customs has been one of the few chapters of NAFTA talks that has seen significant progress.
Speaking during the same panel as Morales, Kim Campbell, founder of MKMARIN, a Canadian customs brokerage, said that much of the current work in U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP’s) Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee (COAC) is a “big foundational piece” for developing a North American single window.
Both Campbell and Morales envisage a unified North American single window involving a common set of data elements that would enable more seamless customs filings for imports and exports between the United States, Canada and Mexico, but not necessarily a common North American customs filing portal.
“We never thought it would … be one system because [there are] sovereignty issues, cost issues, all kinds of other things that governments [would need] to take a look at,” Campbell said.
Canada’s single-window platform is up and running, and it’s “changing everything that we do,” as partner government agencies (PGAs) are expecting more information and different information from filers than the PGAs previously collected, Campbell said.
“So we’re struggling a little bit with that,” she said. “We’re also struggling with the new technology that the PGAs are not necessarily plugged into it. … We’re having a very difficult time on uptake.”
Canadian authorities are planning to make that single-window system mandatory for filers next April, with a requirement for filers to be approved for such filings “by January,” Campbell said.
Mexican authorities should remove language barriers on their country’s single window for exports and create standards for use of English in the system, Morales said.
That could help fix data exchange issues associated with single-window filings for exports from Mexico to its North American trading partner countries that don’t exist between the United States and Canada, he said.
“We were pushing very hard in the NAFTA talks to modernize [filing data exchange] and reducing the burden to importers and exporters.”
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