President hails deal ‘incredible for both parties’ and says negotiations with
Canada will start ‘relatively soon’
Donald Trump has said he will strike a new
trade deal with
Mexico while ripping up the
North American Free Trade Agreement (
NAFTA) and threatening a trade war with Canada.
“I’ll be terminating the existing deal and going into this deal,” the US president told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. “We’ll be starting negotiating with Canada relatively soon. They want to negotiate very badly.”
He added: “One way or the other, we have a deal with Canada. It’ll either be a tariff on cars or it will be a negotiated deal. Frankly, a tariff on cars is a much easier way to go but perhaps the other would be much better for Canada.”
Trump also said it might be possible to make a deal involving all three countries, like the 24-year-old Nafta pact, but that separate bilateral agreements are also a possibility.
However, any trade deal would have to first be approved by Congress, and time is running out. Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto will soon leave office and there is no guarantee his successor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will agree to the same terms.
Nafta reduced most trade barriers between the US, Mexico and Canada. But Trump and other critics say it encouraged US manufacturers to move south of the border to exploit low-wage Mexican labour.
With typical showmanship, the president invited reporters into the Oval Office, where he called Nieto by speakerphone, but aides had to offer the president their technical help. “Hello?!” Trump said into the machine at one point.
NBC News journalist Josh Lederman tweeted: “This is very likely a first in history: A White House pool spray where the president of the US puts a foreign leader on speakerphone.”
The announcement came after months of negotiations between the US and its southern neighbour.
Trump said it would be called the
United States-Mexico Trade Agreement. “We’ll get rid of the name Nafta,” he said. “It has a bad connotation because the United States was hurt very badly by Nafta for many years and it’s now a really good deal for both countries.”
He added: “I think it is one of the largest trade deals ever made – maybe the largest trade deal ever made.”
The agreement with Mexico requires 75% of a car’s value to be manufactured in North America, up from Nafta’s current level of 62.5%, Reuters reported. It would also require 40% to 45% of the car to be made by workers earning at least $16 per hour.
Trump has repeatedly called Nafta a job-killing “disaster” for the US.
In the conversation with Nieto, Trump said of the new deal: “This is something that’s very special for our manufacturers and for our farmers from both countries, for all of the people that work for jobs. It’s also great trade and it makes it a much more fair bill and we are very, very excited about it.”
Speaking through an interpreter, Nieto said he hoped Nafta partner Canada will eventually be incorporated into the deal. “It is our wish, Mr President, that now Canada will also be able to be incorporated in all this. I assume that they are going to carry out negotiations of the sensitive bilateral issues between Canada and the United States.”
But the US president said: “We haven’t started with Canada yet. We wanted to do Mexico and see if that was possible to do.”
Trump said he would be calling the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, imminently. “If they’d like to negotiate fairly, we’ll do that. They have tariffs of almost 300% on some of our dairy products so we can’t have that, we’re not going to start with that.
“I think with Canada, frankly, the easiest thing we can do is to tariff their cars coming in. It’s a tremendous amount of a money and it’s a simple negotiation. It could end in one day and we take in a lot of money the following day.
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“But I think we’ll have a chance to probably have a separate deal. We could have a separate deal or we could put it into this deal.”
Adam Austen, a spokesman for the Canadian foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, said: “Canada is encouraged by the continued optimism shown by our negotiating partners. Progress between Mexico and the United States is a necessary requirement for any renewed Nafta agreement.”
Austen said the Canadians had been in regular contact with the Nafta negotiators.
“We will only sign a new Nafta that is good for Canada and good for the middle class,” he said, adding that “Canada’s signature is required”.
Talks to overhaul the Nafta agreement began a year ago and have proven contentious. The Trump administration wants a higher percentage of auto production to come from within the Nafta bloc before qualifying for duty-free status. It also has complaints about Canada’s protection for its dairy farmers and the way disputes are resolved under Nafta.