Carney said he had been close to a deal with the administration in October before Trump walked away from talks.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Prime Minister Mark Carney says he does not expect that Canada and the U.S. will reach a near-term deal to end President Donald Trump’s tariffs on steel, aluminum, autos and other sectors, and that these negotiations will instead be rolled into a review of the pact that governs continental trade.
Mr. Carney also said that a list of U.S. priorities in those coming talks released this week was only “a subset of issues of a much bigger discussion,” suggesting that he expects Mr. Trump to put more demands on the table.
Speaking to reporters in Ottawa on Thursday, before signing a deal with Ontario Premier Doug Ford to speed up approvals for infrastructure projects, Mr. Carney said he had been close to a deal with the administration in October before Mr. Trump walked away from talks.
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“It was the case that we were close to an agreement. We didn’t get that agreement. From our perspective, the terms of that agreement are still on the table,” he said. “If the U.S. wanted to sit down this weekend, we could sit down this weekend and hammer out a sectoral deal. I’m confident of that from our side.”
But he said he did not think that was likely to happen, and so instead, these issues will be discussed as part of a review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, referred to by the Americans as USMCA and Canadians as CUSMA.
“My judgment is that that is going to roll into the broader CUSMA negotiations,” he said.
The formal review isn’t scheduled until July 1.
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The two countries negotiated for months over Mr. Trump’s tariffs and were close to deals on lifting at least some of the tariffs, before Mr. Trump ended talks over an Ontario government anti-tariff ad that aired on U.S. television in October. The ad campaign was later pulled at the request of Mr. Carney.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer this week presented the administration’s priority list for USMCA talks in closed-door sessions with two congressional committees. According to a written version of his presentation subsequently published by his office, he singled out supply management and Canada’s Online Streaming Act, which allows its telecom regulator to mandate Canadian content, as the two top irritants he planned to address in negotiations.