Canadian and U.S. trade negotiators were beginning to put ideas on paper about a possible deal before U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly ended trade talks last week, Canada’s ambassador in Washington says.
“We were trying to define the contours of what a first step in an agreement between Canada and the United States could look like,” Ambassador Kirsten Hillman told the Senate foreign affairs committee on Wednesday.
Trump abruptly called off negotiations in a late-night social media post last Thursday over an Ontario government ad that uses former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s own words to send an anti-tariff message to American audiences.
Canada’s ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman, told a Senate committee on Wednesday that negotiators were trying to “define the contours of a first step” for a trade deal before US President Donald Trump abruptly ended trade discussions last week.
Hillman was asked at the committee hearing where talks were headed before the sudden halt. While he noted progress had been made since Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit to Washington earlier this month, he said some sticking points remained.
“I don’t want to suggest that we were close to reaching an agreement. But, in my opinion, we had made more progress in those weeks than we had in a long time,” Hillman said.
Earlier on Wednesday, Carney and Trump came face-to-face for the first time since the president called the talks off. The two were sitting on the other side of the table and
Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced his government would pull the ad that appeared to unleash Trump last week, but not before it played over the weekend, including on American networks during the World Series.
Several witnesses told CBC News that U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra lashed out at Ontario’s trade representative in Washington while attending an event in Ottawa. Former deputy prime minister John Manley weighs in on what this means for the state of trade talks between the two countries. Plus, former US ambassador to Canada Gordon Giffin says he ‘grieves’ over the current status of dialogue between the two countries.
He Globe and Mail reported last weekciting anonymous sources, that an agreement on aluminum and steel could be reached as early as the APEC summit, although Carney downplayed that report.
“We are in talks with the Americans and I wouldn’t exaggerate,” Carney told reporters in Ottawa last week when asked about the Globe story.
Hillman told the committee that talks in recent weeks had focused on steel and aluminum, but that did not necessarily exclude other industries.
“The United States expressed a desire to start with some issues and try to move forward on them, not ruling out the others, but perhaps accelerating talks on some of them first and then addressing the others,” Hillman said.
[sector] to the exclusion of others. It is more a question of sequencing — at least in the US’s eyes — and the US is saying, ‘We would like to sequence it this way.’”
