NAFTA talks continue — without Canadians
OTTAWA — Canada’s continental partners are simply trying to work through difficult bilateral sticking points on NAFTA, federal insiders insist, even as the Canadian government appears to have been left out of ongoing talks between the United States and Mexico.
A senior government official said Tuesday that the U.S. and Mexico’s return to the table to sort out their differences is a positive sign for the future of the North American Free Trade Agreement — even if Canada wasn’t invited to take part.
Top Canadian negotiators are expected to rejoin NAFTA talks by mid-August although no meetings have been scheduled yet, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter in public.
U.S. trade czar Robert Lighthizer and Mexican Economy Secretary Ildefonso Guajardo will meet again this week in Washington to discuss NAFTA, according to media reports. They also met face to face last week.
Trade talks between the two countries have intensified since the recent election win by Mexico’s president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has assigned his own experts to work with officials from the outgoing administration on pursuing an updated NAFTA before he takes office Dec. 1.
American optimism about a new NAFTA deal has also been heating up. In recent days, the Trump administration has signalled an agreement could be reached on the pact by the end of August. So far, however, Canadian negotiators have yet to participate in the summertime, highlevel push towards an update to the three-country deal.
The Canadian official rejected the idea Ottawa has been frozen out of the talks and argued it’s not unusual for two of the NAFTA partners to hold discussions on bilateral issues without the third partner in the room. They said Canada is confident NAFTA will remain a trilateral deal, even though U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened in the past to ditch it for one-on-one trade agreements.
The official also noted that the U.S. and Mexico have issues to figure out between themselves, such as their differences on labour changes in the auto sector, textiles and seasonal fruits.
Another senior Canadian source said they’re “not that fazed at all” by the U.S.-Mexican meetings on NAFTA. “I feel somewhat, cautiously encouraged by the fact that the Mexicans are able to be back at the table,” the source said. “The fact they’re able to carve out some space to pick up on the conversation from where it was at, without knowing the outcomes, that at least isn’t a bad thing.”