On the evening of Oct. 3, 1987, Brian Mulroney was in his office in the Langevin Block, on a conference call with his team in Washington which had just initialled the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.
It was almost literally five minutes to midnight, and the expiration of president Ronald Reagan’s “fast track authority,” to negotiate a deal “up or down,” without amendments by the U.S. Congress.
The Americans, led by treasury secretary Jim Baker, had finally agreed to an independent dispute-settlement panel, which they had always refused on the grounds it would impede their sovereignty. For Mulroney, the dispute-settlement mechanism was his deal breaker, as he had told Baker earlier that evening in a conversation that proved to be decisive.
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