By the mid-1980s, the growth of the maquiladoras, Mexico's entrance into the GATT, and the three North American governments' willingness to relax trade rules signaled that the regional economic integration tsunami was unlikely to recede. North American unions, however, were unprepared to respond collectively to the possible economic devastation they faced. Forty years of Cold War politicking and divisiveness left them with a weak institutional foundation from which to organize trinationally. And then came NAFTA. It was widely believed the agreement would generate national responses by labor unions in each of the three countries, but little transnational contestation. This assumption was plausible given past behavior – the underwhelming response of U.S. unions to NAFTA's precursor, the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA). Whereas the agreement catalyzed the most significant political struggle in decades among Canadian unions (and civil society organizations), it generated little reaction from unions south of their border, despite joint membership in many of the same internationals. The former secretary-treasurer of the CLC revealed that this caused some resentment among Canadian activists: