McCain Pushes Nafta in Visit to Canada

[Joanne98]

By MICHAEL COOPER and JOHN M. BRODER
OTTAWA — Senator John McCain’s campaign sent out an e-mail message on Friday highlighting what it called Senator Barack Obama’s “completely mystifying shift” on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The Republican National Committee issued a news release charging that Mr. Obama is “for free trade but against free trade agreements” and even released a Web video about Mr. Obama and free trade.

Mr. McCain’s campaign plane, full of reporters, made an unusual foray past the battleground states here to Canada, where Mr. McCain gave a speech to the Economic Club of Canada in which he was applauded for saying that “for all the successes of Nafta, we have to defend it without equivocation in political debate.”

But throughout the visit here Mr. McCain did not refer to Mr. Obama by name and insisted the trip had “nothing to do” with the presidential campaign. Democrats charged that assistance the campaign received from the United States ambassador to Canada might have violated the federal law that forbids certain government employees to engage in partisan politics; the McCain campaign denied any wrongdoing, saying that the trip was not political and that the campaign had raised no money in Canada.

Mr. McCain demurred at campaign-related questions from Canadian and American reporters at a news conference, saying that answering them “would then lend a political bent to this visit.”

The backdrop to the unusual trip was a simmering debate that Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has been waging with Mr. Obama, his all-but-certain Democratic rival. The debate centers on Nafta, but it is really about much more than tariffs and treaties.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/us/politics/21trade.html?_r=1&ref=politics&oref=slogin