ENROLLED
2019 Regular Session
HOUSE RESOLUTION NO. 261
BY REPRESENTATIVE GAROFALO
A RESOLUTION
To memorialize the United States Congress to take such actions as are necessary to approve
the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement in order to ensure continuity in trade
among the three North American economic partners.
WHEREAS, the imposition of artificial barriers to free and open trade are harmful
to American economic interests; and
WHEREAS, together, the United States, Canada, and Mexico promote a shared belief
in freedom, representative democracy, and market principles as recognized in the
Constitution of United States; and
WHEREAS, a longstanding, close, trilateral relationship, codified in the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has existed between the United States, Canada,
and Mexico for more than twenty years and has proven economically, culturally, and
strategically important for all parties; and
WHEREAS, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement is a renegotiation of
NAFTA and will extend the benefits enjoyed as a result of NAFTA; and
WHEREAS, since NAFTA was instituted in 1994, trade with Canada and Mexico
has nearly quadrupled to one trillion three hundred billion dollars; and
WHEREAS, Mexico and Canada buy more than one-third of the United States'
merchandise exports; and
WHEREAS, Canada and Mexico represent either the first or second largest export
market in forty-three states; and all but one state count our neighbors as a top-three trading
partner; and
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WHEREAS, NAFTA has contributed to a three hundred fifty percent increase in
United States agricultural exports to Canada and Mexico; and
WHEREAS, the United States ran a cumulative trade surplus in manufactured goods
with Canada and Mexico of more than seventy-nine billion dollars over the six-year period
from 2008 to 2014 with a surplus in services of over forty-one billion dollars in 2014 alone;
and
WHEREAS, NAFTA has been a boon to competitiveness for United States
manufacturers, which added more than eight hundred thousand jobs in the four years after
the institution of NAFTA, with Canadian and Mexican consumers purchasing four hundred
eighty-seven billion dollars of United States manufactured goods in 2014, generating nearly
forty thousand dollars in export revenue per every American factory worker; and
WHEREAS, United States service exports to Canada and Mexico have tripled, rising
from twenty-seven billion dollars in 1993 to ninety-two billion dollars in 2014, thanks to
new market access and clearer rules afforded by NAFTA and which will be continued by the
United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement; and
WHEREAS, Canada and Mexico are the top two export destinations for United
States small and medium-sized enterprises; more than one hundred twenty-five thousand of
which sold their goods and services in Canada and Mexico in 2014; and
WHEREAS, trade among our North American trading partners is made up
predominantly of intellectual property-intensive goods and services that employ millions of
Americans in high paying jobs and which generate billions of dollars in economic output;
and
WHEREAS, trade agreements are the most appropriate mechanism to harmonize and
strengthen intellectual property rights protections ensuring that domestic and foreign
businesses are on the same equal footing as before the law; and
WHEREAS, many of the intellectual property-intensive goods, services, and
exchanges through which trade is facilitated in the NAFTA bloc did not exist when the
agreement was drafted, which has resulted in uneven and weak intellectual property
enforcement; and
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WHEREAS, stringent enforcement of intellectual property rights has been found to
correlate closely with greater household income, foreign direct investment, and gross
domestic product; and
WHEREAS the intellectual property provisions found in the United States-Mexico-
Canada Agreement are the most comprehensive of any multilateral United States trade
agreement and are vastly superior to those included in NAFTA.
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Legislature of Louisiana does hereby
memorialize the United States Congress to take such actions as are necessary to approve the
United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement in order to ensure continuity in trade among the
three North American economic partners.
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that a copy of this Resolution be transmitted to the
President of the United States, the members of the United States Senate Committee on
Finance, the members of the United States House Committee on Ways and Means, the
members of the Senate and House Advisory Groups on Negotiations, the presiding officers
of the Senate and the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States of
America, each member of the Louisiana congressional delegation, the United States Trade
Representative, the United States secretaries of Commere, State, and Labor, the director of
the Office of Management and Budget, and the United States Intellectual Property
Enforcement coordinator.
SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
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