US President Donald Trump’s administration and Canada are making a renewed push to keep the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) a trilateral accord, prompting the US and Mexico to postpone publishing on Friday a text of their two-way trade deal on Friday, Mexican Minister of Economic Affairs Ildefonso Guajardo said.
Mexico earlier in the day said it was planning to release on Friday evening a more complete draft of its preliminary trade agreement with the US, in tandem with an expected release by the Trump administration.
Under US trade law, the pact has to be published 60 days before Trump can sign it, after which it then goes to the US Congress for approval. The countries also want a deal this weekend to allow Mexico’s government time to sign it before Mexican president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador takes over as president on Dec. 1.
Photo: Reuters
The US and Canada are continuing to push for a deal on trade over the weekend, Guajardo said in Mexico City late on Friday.
“At this moment there’s a very serious attempt to continue advancing in the process of finalizing the differences in bilateral issues between the US and Canada,” he said. “In the next 48 hours, we will know if we can go ahead with a trilateral text, or will need to find ourselves with a need to put up a text of bilateral understanding and then define the legal actions that can maintain the possibility of a trilateral format.”
The US and Canada are in a constant state of negotiation, a Canadian government official said on Friday.
The official said the US knows what concessions Canada needs to sign onto a deal.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Thursday spoke with Lopez Obrador, who indicated that he would not reopen the accord — raising the notion that talks could stretch on longer than previously thought — but that he would insist on Canada remaining in it.
“I told him that we will keep insisting on having a trilateral agreement and we hope there will be an agreement between the US and Canada,” Lopez Obrador said on Friday. “There’s still time to achieve a trilateral agreement. In any case, we already agreed with the US and we won’t revise what is agreed.”
The White House declined to comment on Friday.
Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland has led NAFTA talks for her country, and said that the sides are in a continuous negotiation phase.
An election is scheduled for Monday in Quebec, a major Canadian dairy-producing province. Trudeau is under pressure to make dairy concessions as part of any deal. Publishing an agreement after polls close on Monday might dampen any political blowback from concessions.
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