In the years immediately preceding NAFTA, my wife and I lived in Ann Arbor. My wife worked in downtown Detroit, which was right across the river from Windsor.
For the daily activities average person, the economies could not have been more closely connected. My wife and her co-workers would routinely drive to Canada for lunch. They would only show a drivers license at the border. One time my wife’s friend forgot her wallet and the border guards just smiled waived them through.
We took several weekend excursions to Canada and it honestly felt like we were traveling to another state.
Businesses on both sides of border routinely accepted coins from either side of the border on a 1-1 equivalency, even though the US quarter was worth a few cents more. If you asked an average person to empty their coin purse, it would have coins from both countries co-mingled.
On my first business trip to Canada after they implemented NAFTA, I was shocked at how much had changed. They demanded a passport for entry and exit (I actually talked my way into Canada with only a drivers license that first time, and my wife Fedex-ed my passport to my hotel for the return trip).
It was then that I realized that NAFTA never intended to facilitate economic cooperation for the average person. It was solely intended to benefit a small set of multinational corporations, and made the life of the average person living near the border more inconvenient.
Unfortunately, much has changed, and they will never turn back the clock to casual friendly relationships that existed along the US/Canada border, but I won’t miss NAFTA one bit.
I remember around 2000 walking across the bridge at Niagara Falls and having to pay something like 50 cents to walk back into my own country.
Those border passport provisions had nothing to do with NAFTA. They were a George W. Bush program, implemented after 9-11.