On 25–26 November 2008, the Regional Economic Studies Programme of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Singapore organized a forum on “Regional Economic Integration: ASEAN and Canadian Perspectives”. The forum gathered Southeast Asian and Canadian experts to focus on common issues related to regional economic integration. The broad objective of the forum was to promote research partnerships and build stronger economic, political and socioeconomic linkages between ASEAN and Canadian institutions.

The forum started with a keynote address by Professor Kishore Mahbubani, Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. Thereafter, the sessions examined the various aspects of regional integration — trade and investment issues, institutional development, governance and accountability, different approaches to dispute resolution, winners and losers in economic integration, labour mobility issues, etc.

The forum concluded that fundamentally the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were two different kinds of agreements. First, while NAFTA focused entirely on trade, the scope of AFTA was much broader and went beyond issues of trade and investment alone. Secondly, NAFTA was a lightly institutionalized regional trade agreement. There was no formal institutional or policy development. For ASEAN, a secretariat was created in 1976, and expanded and strengthened in 1992, the year of AFTA's creation. Third, the dispute settlement mechanism system in ASEAN was different from that of NAFTA. The ASEAN provisions were scattered over a number of documents, and cover both trade/investment disputes and other (for example, political or territorial) disputes, while the NAFTA provisions were contained in a single document and could be applied only to trade and investment-related matters.