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NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana : The leaders of the United States, Canada and Mexico delivered a ringing defence on Tuesday of a regional free trade deal despite pledges by Democratic White House hopefuls to renegotiate the pact.
US President George W. Bush berated the Democrats vying to succeed him, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, for criticising the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which he insisted has benefited the three neighbours.
Both candidates, who sought on Tuesday to clinch a key primary in Pennsylvania in their battle for the Democratic nomination, have warned they would renegotiate NAFTA if elected president in November.
"Now is not the time to renegotiate NAFTA or walk away from NAFTA," Bush told a joint news conference alongside Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon during the summit here.
"People who say, 'Let's get rid of NAFTA' as a throw-away political line, must understand this has been good for America and it's also been, you know, good for Mexico and Canada," the US president said.
Calderon, who will host next year's NAFTA summit, which will be attended by a new US president, rejected calls to change the trade pact.
"We agreed that this is not the time to even think about amending it or cancelling it," he said. "This is the time to strengthen and reinvigorate this free trade agreement among our three countries."
But Harper said he would be ready to renegotiate if the next US president demands it.
"We would be ready to do anything that any of our partners wants to do. If one of our partners wants to negotiate NAFTA, we'll do it. We'll renegotiate," he said.
"But this is not the position that we prefer, the government of Canada," Harper said.
The Bush administration says three-way trade totalled 930 billion dollars last year and will reach the one-trillion-dollar mark this year.
But the trade pact, one of the largest in the world, has been a frequent target of labour union charges that it has helped bleed US manufacturing jobs.
NAFTA came into effect in 1994 under Clinton's husband, then-president Bill Clinton, but his wife has been a critic of the deal on the campaign trail.
Clinton and Obama, who are seeking the party's ticket to stand against Republican candidate John McCain in the November election, have exchanged fire over their positions on NAFTA.
Obama's campaign last month accused Clinton of lying to voters about her opposition to the trade pact, blamed in industrial areas such as Pennsylvania for killing jobs.
The charge was levelled after the release of more than 11,000 pages of schedules from Clinton's time as first lady, which showed her attending several meetings on NAFTA in 1993.
The Obama campaign seized on ABC News reports which cited participants at one of the meetings as saying Clinton was fully supportive of NAFTA, which her husband's administration was lobbying hard to get through Congress.
Before the March 4 primary in Ohio, Clinton had savaged the Obama campaign for its alleged inconsistency on NAFTA and asserted her own longstanding opposition to the pact.
Her campaign has pointed to a meeting between Obama's chief economic advisor and Canadian diplomats in which he allegedly said the candidate's talk against NAFTA was just campaign rhetoric. - AFP/de
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