TRUMP SAYS TRADE MEETING WITH CANADA REJECTED
GTON» President Donald
W A SHI N
Trump said Wednesday that he rejected a oneonone meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over the trade dispute involving the North American neighbors and renewed his threat to slap tariffs on cars imported from Canada as negotiations drag on.
Trudeau spokeswoman Eleanore Catenaro said in response: “No meeting was requested. We don’t have any comment beyond that.”
In an extraordinary rebuke of America’s northern neighbor, Trump vented his frustration with Canada during a news conference along the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, the latest sign of deteriorating relations between two allies who share a border.
“His tariffs are too high, and he doesn’t seem to want to move. And I’ve told him forget about it,” Trump said of Trudeau. “And frankly, we’re thinking about just taxing cars coming in from Canada. That’s the mother lode. That’s the big one.”
“We’ve very unhappy with the negotiations and the negotiating style of Canada. We don’t like their representative very much,” Trump said in an apparent reference to Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, Chrystia Freeland, who has been negotiating with U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer.
Canada, the United States’ No. 2 trading partner, was left out when the U.S. and Mexico reached an agreement last month to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement. The U.S. and Canada are under pressure to reach a deal by the end of the month, when Lighthizer must make public the full text of the agreement with Mexico.
But Trump suggested he may go forward with a revamped NAFTA without Canada. The president said it would be called “USM,” for the U.S. and Mexico, instead of “USMC,” and offered blunt criticism of the Canadian team engaged in the talks.
Any push by Trump to slap a 25 percent tariff on imported autos and auto parts from Canada might help American workers but could also inflate car prices, make U.S. manufacturers less competitive and generate retaliation.
Approximately four in five cars assembled in Canada are exported. The Canadian Automobile Dealers Association has warned that the auto tariffs could affect billions of dollars of exports and lead to the loss of more than 100,000 jobs across the country.
Relations between the two neighbors have been strained since Trump assailed Trudeau at the G7 meeting in June, calling him a “weak” and “dishonest” backstabber. — The Associated Press