By Promit Mukherjee<\/p>\n
OTTAWA (Reuters) -Canada’s International Trade Minister said on Thursday that there was an appetite from both sides to advance conversations on a trade deal with South American bloc Mercosur, as Canada seeks trade pacts globally in push to diversify from the U.S.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Mark Carney and his team have been locked in talks with U.S. President Donald Trump to hash out a trade deal by August 1, which could help reduce tariffs on Canada.<\/p>\n
But his government is also preparing to rely less on a relationship that generated bilateral trade of over C$1 trillion ($727.33 billion) last year and focusing on diversifying trade by signing free trade pacts globally.<\/p>\n
“I had conversations with the foreign minister of Brazil, and there is appetite to carry conversations around Mercosur,” , Minister Maninder Sidhu said in an interview with Reuters.<\/p>\n
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had said in April that he was interested in advancing talks for a trade deal between South America’s Mercosur bloc and Canada.<\/p>\n
Mercosur – which includes Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay – has had negotiation rounds for a trade deal with Canada in the past.<\/p>\n
Canada is also keen to continue talks with China to address trade challenges and sees a thawing of relations between India and Canada as an important step to support trade, the Minister said.<\/p>\n
Canada has 15 free-trade deals covering 51 countries, giving it access to 1.5 billion consumers and Sidhu said that Canada will be pursuing more such deals in the coming months without giving a specific target.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Promit Mukherjee; Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Rod Nickel)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Promit Mukherjee OTTAWA (Reuters) -Canada’s International Trade Minister said on Thursday that there was an appetite from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4241,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5049,49,48,5048,5047,44,862,5046,2661],"class_list":["post-4240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-bilateral-trade","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-conversations","tag-mercosur","tag-news","tag-president-donald-trump","tag-prime-minister-mark-carney","tag-trade-deal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4240\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}