Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has ruled out making concessions ahead of further talks with the US while a top US official warned the two countries remain fundamentally misaligned on trade.<\/p>\n
The comments come at a tense time for US-Canada trade and as the future of a major North American free trade deal remains unclear.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, US trade representative Jamieson Greer told Congress that Canada is “doubling down on globalisation when we’re trying to correct for the problems of globalisation”.<\/p>\n
Carney meanwhile told reporters that Ottawa will not let the US “dictate the terms” of free trade negotiations. “It’s not a case where there is someone making demands, and a supplicant,” he said.<\/p>\n
He added: “We have a negotiation, we can come to a mutually successful outcome – it will \u200btake some time.”<\/p>\n
Canada, the US and Mexico are staring down a deadline of 1 July for a mandatory review of the free trade agreement between the three countries, called the USMCA.<\/p>\n
Mexico is due to start formal bilateral negotiating rounds with the US in May, Greer’s office has said. He and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum met on Monday.<\/p>\n
Formal talks between the US and Canada have yet to get underway, though trade officials are in communication.<\/p>\n
Canada has already made some concessions to the US. In June, it dropped a planned tax on big US technology firms after the Trump administration flagged it as an irritant.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, Carney convened a new advisory committee on Canada-US trade relations, with their first meeting set for next week.<\/p>\n
Jean Charest, a former Quebec premier who sits on the new advisory committee, told broadcaster Radio-Canada that the US is looking for “a lot of concessions from Canada” before bilateral talks began.<\/p>\n
The US has raised several trade irritants it hopes to see resolved.<\/p>\n
Among them is the decision by most Canadian provinces to remove US liquor from shelves due to tariffs.<\/p>\n
“There are two countries that have retaliated economically against the United States in the past year – the People’s Republic of China and Canada,” Greer said.<\/p>\n
He warned there may “have to be an enforcement action to deal with this issue”.<\/p>\n
Another is dairy quotas, a longtime irritant for the US, which were brought up again by US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick on Wednesday, who told a Senate committee that Canada treats US dairy farmers “poorly”.<\/p>\n
Last year, President Donald Trump accused Canada of charging “extraordinary tariffs to our dairy farmers – up to 400 per cent”.<\/p>\n
Canadian dairy is produced under a supply-management system, which strictly controls production quotas and imports to support local farmers.<\/p>\n
Some US dairy products are allowed in Canada tariff-free up to a certain limit. That limit has never been reached, however, according to the US Department of Agriculture.<\/p>\n
Dominic LeBlanc, the Canadian minister responsible for US-Canada trade, told the Globe and Mail newspaper on Wednesday that dairy is off the table.<\/p>\n
“We’ve been very clear with them,” LeBlanc said.<\/p>\n
But he added that Ottawa has “solutions to most of what the Americans raise”.<\/p>\n
“We’re happy to sit down and go through that with them. But it’s got to be part of a larger, more comprehensive arrangement,” he said.<\/p>\n
Greer also said that he hopes that negotiators can “get over the hump on some of these things to have significant talks”.<\/p>\n
It is unclear when Canadian and American negotiators will formally sit down to hash out these disagreements, though both have signalled it is unlikely a deal will be reached by the July deadline.<\/p>\n
Still, Greer, speaking to the House committee, said the US goal with USMCA talks is to “make sure that we maintain market access into these countries”.<\/p>\n
In the case a deal is not reached, the USMCA could be subject to annual reviews until it is set to expire in 2036.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has ruled out making concessions ahead of further talks with the US while…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15591,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[8179,17,6409,7492,111,7702,438],"class_list":{"0":"post-15590","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mark-carney","8":"tag-bilateral-talks","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-free-trade-agreement","11":"tag-jamieson-greer","12":"tag-mark-carney","13":"tag-radio-canada","14":"tag-us-canada"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}