Canada said Thursday it would continue to participate in talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement throughout the summer, signaling a cooling down of tensions between the U.S. and Canada following a public spat between the countries’ leaders last weekend.
“We decided … to continue our negotiations on NAFTA,” Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland told Canadian television following a meeting in Washington with her counterpart, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. “We will be working hard over the summer. We didn’t set specific dates today. We talked about following up on setting up specific dates for meetings and that is what we are going to do.”
Mexico, the third partner in the 1993 trade deal, has held off on any commitment on further NAFTA talks until after its July 1 presidential election.
The White House had hoped to complete a new NAFTA deal and have it sent to Congress by mid-May to meet the deadlines imposed by the Trade Promotion Authority law, but the trading partners could not reach agreement. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office did not rule out submitting a deal to Congress this year if one could be reached, saying they were deferring to House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., regarding the deadline. Ryan originally put the date at May 17 but later said there was “probably some wiggle room.”
The deal is not expected anytime soon, however. Canada has resisted most U.S. proposals, such as adding a sunset clause to the trade deal and allowing countries to opt out of its investor-state dispute settlement system. The U.S. has been frustrated by the impasse, and on June 1 imposed U.S. tariffs of 25 percent on imported steel and 10 percent on imported aluminum against Canada and Mexico. The trading partners had been temporarily exempted from the tariffs, first announced in March, to see if the U.S. could resolve various trade disputes with them.
The rockiness of the situation was seen Sunday, when Trump trade policy adviser Peter Navarro said there was a “special place in hell” for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, which Navarro later apologized for. The White House was steamed over Trudeau saying Canada “will not be pushed around” on tariffs after he and President Trump appeared at the Group of Seven summit of industrialized nations in Canada.
A further complication is that Mexico’s leading presidential candidate is former Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a leftist and longtime critic of international trade deals. In a presidential debate Tuesday, Obrador said he thought Mexico would be fine economically if it pulled out of NAFTA. “I am going to suggest that the treaty remains, but [the end of NAFTA] cannot be fatal for Mexicans, our country has a lot of natural resources, a lot of wealth,” he said.
