WTO Reform: From Ideas to Action

In 2020, I was increasingly worried about Canada’s position in the world economy. The United States and China were both using their economic power more aggressively, and countries such as Canada were too small to push back. Our best protection was a strong rules-based international system.

But the institution at the centre of that system was stuck. The WTO could adjudicate old rules, imperfectly, but it had become extraordinarily difficult to make new rules. Countries were increasingly negotiating bilaterally outside the WTO’s multilateral framework, giving the United States and China still greater leverage over smaller countries.

As an academic, I could have written another paper explaining why the system was failing. I wanted instead to ask a different question:

How could we change the institution?

With the cooperation of Global Affairs Canada, I organized a symposium bringing together leading economists, trade lawyers and policymakers. The combination mattered. Economists understand incentives and economic consequences; lawyers understand what can actually be written into international agreements.

More importantly, I imposed a discipline on the discussion. I did not want another catalogue of everything wrong with the WTO. I asked participants to concentrate on problems that were both important and solvable. That was the organizing principle of the symposium.

The result was twelve concrete recommendations for making the trading system work better, which I assembled into a report for Global Affairs Canada.

Looking back, one proposal stands out.

The WTO needed to become more flexible.

Countries willing to move ahead should be able to negotiate together without waiting for every WTO member, while keeping the door open for others to join later. In WTO language, these are open plurilateral agreements.

The principle is simple:

Multilateralism need not mean unanimity.

For countries like Canada, that matters. The alternative to a functioning multilateral system is not some ideal world of universal cooperation. It is a world in which economic size increasingly determines who writes the rules. A more flexible WTO gives smaller countries another route: cooperate with others, move forward where agreement is possible, and preserve a system that others can join later.

I then took the work outside the university. I presented the recommendations at Global Affairs Canada in Ottawa and at Canada’s embassies in Washington and Beijing, and all the way into China, where I presented at Tsinghua University’s PBC School of Finance and held discussions at the People’s Bank of China.

When an institution that matters to Canada was failing, I did not want simply to explain the failure. I wanted to help identify workable ways forward, bring together people who get things done, and carry the resulting ideas into the policy arena.

That, to me, is what policy-engaged scholarship should do.