A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

Barack Obama has ratcheted up his attacks on NAFTA, but a senior member of his campaign team told a Canadian official not to take his criticisms seriously, CTV News has learned.

Both Obama and Hillary Clinton have been critical of the long-standing North American Free Trade Agreement over the course of the Democratic primaries, saying that the deal has cost U.S. workers' jobs.

Within the last month, a top staff member for Obama's campaign telephoned Michael Wilson, Canada's ambassador to the United States, and warned him that Obama would speak out against NAFTA, according to Canadian sources.

The staff member reassured Wilson that the criticisms would only be campaign rhetoric, and should not be taken at face value.

But Tuesday night in Ohio, where NAFTA is blamed for massive job losses, Obama said he would tell Canada and Mexico "that we will opt out unless we renegotiate the core labour and environmental standards."

Just utterly pathetic. Say one thing and do another--and anger a trading ally in the process. Weren't we told that these traits were a hallmark of the Bush Presidency? It would appear that the Politics of Hope resides in an especially fragile glass house.

Meanwhile, as the Obama campaign struggles to figure out what it really thinks about trade, this editorial tries to help set things straight:

The president's job is to take the long view of what's best for the country as a whole. Although it's hard to pinpoint jobs lost or created because of NAFTA, U.S. employment has grown far beyond ?kaid=108&subid=127&contentid=1391 even pessimistic estimates of the trade deal's costs. You wouldn't know that listening to Obama, who declared in a recent speech that "trade deals like NAFTA ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage." His stance is echoed by Clinton, who scolded Obama's campaign for distributing a flier that said she had called NAFTA a "boon" to the economy.

The centerpiece of both candidates' positions on trade is that future deals must include "good" or "strong" labor and environmental standards. That's vaguely comforting and feel-good-ish, but it's also misleading. Higher standards won't protect jobs and bottle up capital in the U.S. over the long term.

That's why the best course is to embrace free trade and fight for lower tariffs and other barriers to U.S. goods and services overseas. Protecting U.S. workers means giving them the education, training and, if necessary, retraining needed to compete for the higher-paying jobs that result from open markets. The capital and jobs that leave can help U.S. workers too by fostering stronger economies in the rest of the world and thus creating markets in which we can sell our products.

The increasingly global nature of business causes pain, but it's better to adapt to the competition than shake your fist at it.

Especially when the fist-shaking is so unbelievably fake.

UPDATE: It should be noted that the Canadian Embassy denies the CTV story. It should also be noted that CTV stands by its story.