Making Canadian trade policy: Domestic decison making and the negotiation of the Auto Pact and the CUFTA

The creation of a bilateral trade agreement involves more than successive bargaining rounds with an external trading partner. Long before formal negotiations begin, the idea to negotiate with an external trading partner takes shape in the domestic sphere where it may rise on the government's decision agenda as a potential solution to a perceived problem.;This thesis characterizes the process of bilateral trade policy development as an integrated series of successive decisions that move the process from domestic agenda setting to joint bargaining on agreement content and, finally, back to the domestic realm for ratification. This thesis argues that, in the formation of bilateral trade agreements, multiple streams and bargaining activities are interdependent and functionally linked. So, similarly, are domestic and external processes. Through the articulation of a multiple streams-synthetic utility bargaining model, this thesis demonstrates that the domestic processes leading up to a decision to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement shape and constrain what is possible in the bilateral negotiations themselves, and that the results of bargaining feed back to the domestic level where they, in turn, shape subsequent government decisions related to agreement development.;To better understand the interplay between domestic and bilateral dynamics, this thesis uses two trade agreements negotiated between Canada and the United States as central case studies. The policy evolution of the 1965 Auto Pact and the 1989 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement provide substantive insight into Canada-US trade policy dynamics but the cases also serve as a testing ground for the development of an analytical framework to integrate domestic policy decision making and international negotiations---two traditionally separate areas of inquiry.;John Kingdon's multiple streams theory provides a strong organizing and analytical framework to explain how problem definition, idea diffusion, and key political factors bring a state to the cusp of a decision---including one to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement. The limitation of multiple streams, however, is that the theory does not move beyond a government's initial decision to negotiate with another state, nor does it fully account for the dynamics of bargaining to build domestic coalitions in the politics stream---a process explicitly acknowledged by multiple streams theory. By adding a bargaining model to multiple streams, it is possible to better understand the dynamics of the domestic politics stream and also the subsequent interactions at the bilateral negotiation table after the domestic decision to negotiate is made.