Ottawa

Canada-EU free trade

Not so much. “Sarkozy and Harper will sign something vague that commits to nothing.” What killed the momentum? The no-fixed-date federal election, is what. And that’s problematic, because the whole point of the strategy Jean Charest had been pursuing doggedly since early 2007 was that the best friend Canada could ever, ever have for these negotiations was a European presidency in the hands of Nicolas Sarkozy. That was only going to happen for the six months at the end of 2008 or, as we like to call them now, “the two months at the end of 2008.”

So Charest’s legacy agenda as a free trader on a scale even Mulroney could not have attained has been scuttled. In entirely unrelated news, Harper’s office thinks Charest was mean to them during the election.

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