I would answer the question this way. When U.S. stimulus spending came down the pipe, much was made of the Buy America provisions attached to certain federal spending programs. Many of those had been in place since the 1930s. But the federal government made a bold commitment to negotiate a waiver with the United States, and it told Canadians that's what it would do.
When it went to the United States, I think the United States trade representative must have said to Canadian negotiators: “You have got to be kidding. We are not going to, and we couldn't conceivably, at a time when our economy is in such disarray, abandon one of the few tools we have for actually stimulating the economy and creating jobs. If we took that proposition to the states, we'd lose every seat in Congress.”
That's what I'm sure the Canadian negotiators heard. So what did they say at that point? Did they come back to Canadians and say, “Look, we're not going to get the waiver we told you we were negotiating. We should talk about how to put in place the same kinds of local preferences that every other member of the OECD establishes”? No. At that point they adopted a strategy of a deal at any cost.