Negotiations for NAFTA to resume in Washington
OTTAWA — Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland returns to Washington Tuesday to resume negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Freeland and her counterpart, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, left the bargaining table Friday without a deal.
The two sides have so far been unable to resolve key differences over U.S. access to the Canadian dairy market, a cultural exemption for Canada and the Chapter 19 dispute resolution mechanism. Negotiators have chipped away in pursuit of NAFTA 2.0, but the top players took a breather Monday.
Freeland appeared at a women's summit Monday in Toronto, while Lighthizer was overseas to meet with the European Union trade commissioner.
The trip to Washington is expected to be short as Freeland is scheduled to be at a caucus retreat Wednesday.
Ottawa and Washington are hoping to strike an agreement that could be submitted to the U.S. Congress by month's end and would see Canada join a preliminary trade deal the Trump administration reached last month with Mexico.
Meanwhile, the pressure on the Liberals to loosen protections around Canada’s dairy sector took new focus on Sunday as the key stumbling block in North American Free Trade Agreement talks came under scrutiny and spin on political talk shows on both sides of the border.
A member of an influential Congressional panel — and a Donald Trump supporter — said in a Canadian interview that providing American dairy farmers with more access to the Canadian market may appease the president. To the south, Trump’s agriculture secretary suggested deeper concessions would be coming from the Canadians over Canada’s system of managing supply and prices in the dairy sector. Republican Tom Reed, a member of the House ways and means committee, said Trump doesn’t necessarily want the Liberals to get rid of the system, but simply to remove what the Americans see as trade barriers.
“Many have seen this market over the last few decades, from an American point of view, as just being off the table,” Reed said in an interview with Global’s “The West Block” that aired Sunday morning.
The politically thorny issue remains an obstacle in NAFTA negotiations as discussions drag on without an agreement after 13 months of talks, started at Trump’s behest.
How negotiations play out will determine the fate of numerous jobs and hundreds of billions in trade between the two nations.
Dairy has been singled out as a key hurdle, including on Friday when Larry Kudlow, a senior economic adviser to Trump, said in a Fox Business Network interview that what “continues to block the deal is m-i-l-k.”
When asked about Kudlow’s comments, Freeland said bluntly: “He’s not at the negotiating table.”
“We’re looking for a deal which is good for Canadians, which is good for Canadian workers, which is good for Canadian families (and) good for Canadian farmers,” Freeland said on “The West Block.”