NEW PUSH TO KEEP NAFTA TRILATERAL.
Dairy, cultural exemptions seen as sticking points
MEXICO CITY •MexicanEconomy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said on Friday that the United States and Canada are making a serious attempt to reach a deal on the North American Free Trade Agreement, saying that within 48 hours it would become clear if the deal would remain trilateral. “In the next 48 hours we will know if we’re going to go with a trilateral text (that includes Canada) or if we’re going to be forced to publish a text of the bilateral (U.S.-Mexico) deal,” Guajardo told lawmakers. The United States and Mexico abruptly cancelled plans to publish NAFTA texts on Friday, sources told Reuters, as signs of renewed efforts by Ottawa and Washington to settle their trade differences. The decision to hold the texts was made in order to give Canada more time to come on board, one senior source familiar with the talks told Reuters. Another source said the United States asked Canada on Thursday to detail its negotiating positions and Canada responded. The formal text of the U.S.-Mexico deal needed to be released by Sunday so it could be presented to the U.S. Congress by the end of the month and fulfil a 60-day notice requirement that would allow lawmakers to approve it by Dec. 1 — before the newly elected Mexican government takes power. Multiple sources told The Canadian Press the sticking points between Ottawa and Washington include dairy, preserving Canada’s cultural exemption, and Canada’s insistence on preserving Chapter 19, which allows for independent panels to resolve disputes involving companies and governments. One source said Chapter 19 has not survived the Mexico-U.S. deal, but Chapter 20 — the governmentto-government dispute settlement mechanism — has been preserved in its entirety.
Mexican ambassador Dionisio Perez Jacome said his country still wants Canada to come on board, even if the deadline of the next few days comes and go.
“Hopefully Canada can be included already in the text. If not, then the process gets more complicated, but it’s also possible to come in ... some days after,” Perez Jacome said.
Sources said Mexico is fine with the Trudeau government waiting until after Monday’s Quebec election, because it understands any concession it might be willing to make on allowing greater U.S. access to dairy would be a political bombshell in the final days of the provincial campaign. A source close to the negotiations told The Canadian Press that the vast majority of the U.S.-Mexico text — more than 20 of its approximately 30 chapters — is not the least bit contentious for Canada. That comes as no surprise to trade experts. Laura Dawson, director of the Canada Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, said major work has been completed on most of the chapters since Canada and the U.S. resumed talks. “They are closer now than they’ve ever been. There’s a potential landing strip in all of the negotiated areas,” Dawson said.
Meredith Lilly, an international trade expert at Carleton University in Ottawa, said there’s virtually nothing in the text that will take Canadian negotiators by surprise.
“They should have seen the text by now as part of earlier negotiations, as well as more recent bilateral negotiations,” she said.
There’s no guarantee Congress would allow U.S. President Donald Trump to move forward with a twocountry deal that excludes Canada, because it originally granted him the authority to negotiate a threecountry pact.
Sarah Goldfeder, a former U.S. diplomat based in Ottawa, said she’s not sure Trump actually wants a deal with Canada before the U.S. midterm elections in November, because periodically beating up on Canada and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a convenient channelchanger for a president beset by unfavourable news coverage.
“It’s a deflection from a number of different problems,” she said.
Trump has said he will pursue a trade deal with or without Canada, and has repeatedly threatened to impose punitive tariffs on Canadian automobiles if a trilateral deal can’t be reached. He has already imposed hefty steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada and Mexico, using a section of U.S. trade law that gives him the authority to do so for national security reasons.
The Trudeau government has branded the tariffs illegal and insulting given the close security relationship between Canada and the U.S., including their shared membership in Norad, which defends North American airspace.
Mexico didn’t win any relief from the U.S. on the tariffs in their deal, but Canada is pushing hard for that in the current negotiations.
“It will be really hard for negotiators to bring a deal back to Canada and say, ‘I think we got a pretty good deal, but we didn’t get a release from these national security tariffs’,” said Dawson.
“That’s going to make it very difficult to sell a deal at home.”
THEY ARE CLOSER NOW THAN THEY’VE EVER BEEN. THERE’S A POTENTIAL LANDING STRIP IN ALL OF THE NEGOTIATED AREAS.