The advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on 1 January 1994, its accompanying North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), and resulting Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) brought a potentially major change in the historic pattern of Canada-U.S. environmental governance. In the first instance, NAFTA and NAAEC promised to transform a hitherto almost exclusively bilateral relationship into a new trilateral community, by making many issues, processes, and institutions that flourished along the 49th parallel the subject of a new, and in many ways overarching, trilateral structure (Spencer, Kirton, and Nossal 1982; Swanson 1978). Second, the new CEC, with its single, well-staffed Secretariat and potentially far-reaching powers, provided a new, institutionalized regional center of political activity for an informal relationship long dependent on ad hoc, transgovernmental problem-solving by functional specialists on each side of the border (Fox, Hero, and Nye 1976). Third, by endowing the new CEC with a comprehensive mandate embracing the full range of environmental issues, and by assigning it important trade-related responsibilities, the NAFTA-NAAEC regime took the Canada-U.S. environmental relationship into a more integrated, mutually supportive (though potentially conflictual) connection with the economic subjects, logics, and communities at the center of the Canada-U.S. relationship (Kirton 1994, Kirton 1993). Indeed, the trilateral character, institutional strength, and broad mandate of the CEC suggested that the Canada-U.S. environmental relationship would now importantly and increasingly depend upon how this new, innovative institution would operate in practice. More than three years after the CEC came into existence, there remains considerable disagreement about its overall potential and actual performance. The first and largest group of observers are the skeptical critics. They argued, during the initial NAFTA debate from 1990 to 1993, that the prospective CEC was inadequate to offset the environmentally destructive effects that NAFTA's far-reaching trade and investment liberalization would bring in Mexico and in a Canada-U.S. relationship already five years into its bilateral free trade regime under the 1988 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA). Assessments of the CEC's early operation by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) remained critical (Public Citizen 1995). Scholarly observers assert that the CEC is in a weak position and might contribute to effective transboundary environmental management only insofar as its often reluctant or suspicious member governments will support it (Mumme and Duncan 1996). More recently, among the many reviews that accompanied the July 1997 Congressionally mandated presidential report on NAFTA's performance, there is a widespread view that NAFTA's environmental legacy and the CEC itself have been a disappointment (USTR 1997). The primary concerns are that the CEC and its companion U.S.-Mexican bilateral institutions, the Border Environmental Cooperation Commission (BECC) and the North American Development Bank (NADBank), have insufficient funds to address the large need for new environmental infrastructure, that the CEC has processed few complaints about its member countries' failure to adequately enforce their environmental laws, and that citizens and environmental NGOs (ENGOs) relative to private sector investors have limited access to NAFTA's institutions (Council on Hemispheric Affairs 1997, Economic Policy Institute 1997, Lustig 1997). A second group of observers are contingent optimists (Johnson and Beaulieu 1996, Abbott 1996). They judge that the positive environmental impact of the CEC depends on a host of ever-changing factors in its internal organization and broader environment. These internal factors include include proper staffing for the Secretariat itself, and its technical expertise, analytic quality, and independent verification of information supplied by governments. …