No signs of U.S. budging as nations seek to seal NAFTA deal

WASHINGTON Cabinet-level negotiators from the three NAFTA nations meet again in Washington this week to attempt a breakthrough on the trade deal. It won’t be easy.

Several contentious issues remain unresolved after more than eight months of talks between the U.S., Mexico and Canada to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. Discussions resumed Monday for what U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland hope to be the home stretch of negotiations for a deal this month.

“We’ll be here for as long as is necessary,” Guajardo said as he left the office of the U.S. trade representative by the White House.

Despite insisting that he wants to secure a deal in the coming weeks, Lighthizer hasn’t shown signs of softening on proposals that Canada and Mexico see as damaging to their interests. Guajardo and Freeland, meanwhile, have pledged to stand their ground.

“You can’t say to the other side of the table, ‘You give us everything we want, and by the way the clock is ticking, so you only have 24 hours to do it,’” said Carla Hills, the former U.S. Trade Representative who negotiated NAFTA under president George H. W. Bush in the early 1990s. “It just won’t work that way.”

Lighthizer is pushing to get a NAFTA deal to meet deadlines for the U.S. House and Senate to debate and approve a deal this year. Waiting until 2019, when a new Congress takes over, “changes the whole way you have to kind of construct the deal,” he said last week.

The U.S. official is fresh off a trip to Beijing, where two days of trade discussions ended with China agreeing to keep on talking, and little else. The U.S. asked China to reduce support for high-tech industries and help cut a trade deficit in goods that reached a record US$375 billion last year, according to a document seen by Bloomberg.

The U.S. is pushing to reach a NAFTA deal in principle to start advancing it through Congress, which is understood to mean 95 per cent of the deal is agreed to, according to a summary of a Canadian government briefing published online last week by a rail industry group.

“We are really committed to doing whatever it takes to get a good win-win result,” Freeland told reporters Saturday.

This week’s NAFTA ministerial talks are scheduled to Tuesday and probably Wednesday, said a Canadian official familiar with the plans, speaking on condition of anonymity. Freeland said she has no fixed departure date from talks.

The topic of automobiles is likely to loom large, with Freeland saying ministerial-level talks will focus on that subject. The U.S. has pushed for changes to the 24-year-old pact that would boost domestic auto manufacturing.

At the last round of talks, Mexico was outnumbered by the U.S. and Canada on auto wages, an issue that could upend the nation’s industry.