Trudeau describes cancelling U.S. visit over demands for NAFTA sunset clause

“We already had the bones of a very good agreement for all parties, and I thought it might be opportune for all of us to sit down for a few hours and discuss it.”

Trump seemed to like the idea, Trudeau said.

Then on Tuesday, Vice-President Mike Pence called to say the White House would host the meeting — but on one condition.

“I had to agree to a sunset clause in NAFTA, which is to say every five years, NAFTA would come to an end unless the parties decided to renew it, which is completely unacceptable to us,” he said.

“So I answered that, unfortunately, if that was a precondition to our visit, I was unable to accept — and so we did not go to Washington for that day of negotiations.”

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said Thursday that the decision to slap Canada and Mexico with stiff steel and aluminum tariffs was based on a lack of progress in the NAFTA talks.

“Those talks are taking longer than we had hoped. There is no longer a very precise date when they may be concluded” so they were added to the tariff list, he said.

Neither the tariffs nor a series of retaliatory measures imposed by the federal Liberal government in response will affect the ability to keep renegotiating NAFTA as a separate track, Ross added. “They’re not mutually exclusive behaviours.”

Perrin Beatty, president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and a former Mulroney cabinet minister at the time of the original Canada-U.S. free trade deal, expressed surprise at the sunset-clause tactic.

“That is not the basis on which mature adults negotiate,” Beatty said.

“For someone who prides himself as a negotiator, anybody who does business on the basis of, ‘One side can only win if the other side loses’ usually isn’t in business for very long.”

The Canadian Press

by Canadian Press

Trudeau describes cancelling U.S. visit over demands for NAFTA sunset clause

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