US, Mexico reach Nafta deal, talks with Canada to begin
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump on Monday announced a new trade deal with Mexico, adding that talks with Canada would begin shortly on a new regional free trade pact.
“It’s a big day for trade. A big day for our country. A lot of people felt we’d never get here,” Trump said in remarks from the Oval Office, joined on phone by his Mexican counterpart Enrique Pena Nieto.
US and Mexican negotiators have been working for weeks to iron out differences and revise the nearly 25-year old North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), while Canada was waiting to rejoin the negotiations.
“They use to call it Nafta. We’re going to call it the United States-Mexico trade agreement. We’ll get rid of the name Nafta. It has a bad connotation because the United States was treated very very badly for Nafta,” Trump said.
Pena Nieto welcomed the agreement with equal enthusiasm but pointed out repeatedly that Mexico would like Canada to join the agreement as well.
He said spoke to Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday and urged Ottawa to rapidly rejoin the talks with the goal of getting a final Nafta rewrite this week. “I expressed the importance of them reentering the process with the goal of concluding an agreement this very week,” he tweeted.
Trump said talks with Canada will begin soon and that he will be calling Trudeau shortly. However, he threatened tariffs on Canadian car exports to the US if a deal could not be reached.
“One way or another we’ll have a deal with Canada. It’ll either be a tariff on cars or it’ll be a negotiated deal,” he said.
The new agreement with Mexico, which is still getting its finishing touches, is expected to go into effect in November after a mandatory period of 90 days for public review and comments. Officials said they plan to notify the Congress on Friday.
A senior US trade official said there are hopes that a final three-nation accord can be reached by Friday.
Canada would continue to negotiate, but would only sign a new agreement that is good for the country, a spokesman for foreign minister Chrystia Freeland said.