Washington
\nContentious US-Canada trade talks ended on Friday with no deal to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement after the mood soured, and President Donald Trump notified Congress of his intent to sign a bilateral trade pact with Mexico.<\/p>\n
US and Canadian trade officials set plans to resume their talks on Wednesday with the aim of getting a deal all three nations could sign.<\/p>\n
After four intensive days of talks in Washington between Canada and the United States, the biggest sticking points were familiar ones: US demands for more access to Canada\u2019s closed dairy market and Canadian insistence that a trade dispute settlement system be maintained, not scrapped as Washington wants.
\n\u201cFor Canada, the focus is on getting a good deal, and once we have a good deal for Canada, we\u2019ll be done,\u201d the country\u2019s foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, told a news conference.<\/p>\n
All three countries have stressed the importance of NAFTA, which underpins $1.2 trillion in regional trade. A bilateral deal announced by the United States and Mexico on Monday had paved the way for Canada to rejoin the talks this week.<\/p>\n
But by Friday the sentiment turned, partly on Trump\u2019s explosive off-the-record remarks made to Bloomberg News that any trade deal with Canada would be \u201ctotally on our terms.\u201d He later confirmed the comments, which the Toronto Star first reported.<\/p>\n
Ottawa has stood firm against signing \u201cjust any deal.\u201d Some US lawmakers and business groups expressed concern about Canada\u2019s not yet being not yet part of the agreement.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnything other than a trilateral agreement won\u2019t win Congressional approval and would lose business support,\u201d the chief executive of the US Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The Canadian dollar weakened to C$1.3081 to the US dollar after news of the talks\u2019 lack of a result first broke.<\/p>\n
Canadian stocks remained 0.5 percent lower. Global equities were also down following the hawkish turn in Trump\u2019s comments on trade.<\/p>\n
Following a meeting with Freeland, Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said he was confident the United States and Canada would reach an agreement.<\/p>\n
US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has refused to budge despite repeated efforts by Freeland to offer some concessions on dairy to maintain the independent trade dispute resolution mechanism under Chapter 19 of NAFTA, The Globe and Mail reported on Friday.<\/p>\n
However, a USTR spokeswoman said Canada had made no concessions on agriculture, which includes dairy, but said that negotiations continued.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Washington Contentious US-Canada trade talks ended on Friday with no deal to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement after the mood soured, and President Donald Trump notified Congress of his intent to sign a bilateral trade pact with Mexico. US and Canadian trade officials set plans to resume their talks on Wednesday with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40867,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40866"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40868,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40866\/revisions\/40868"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}