By Promit Mukherjee<\/p>\n
OTTAWA, March 6 (Reuters) – Canada’s minister in charge of trade relations with the U.S., Dominic LeBlanc, will meet with his U.S. counterpart Jamieson \u200cGreer on Friday in Washington, the minister’s office confirmed, as the two \u200ccountries come close to an official review of the North American free trade pact which also includes Mexico.<\/p>\n
The trilateral \u200bfree trade deal called the United States-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) agreement, also known as CUSMA in Canada, is up for review by July 1 this year.<\/p>\n
“They will discuss the upcoming trilateral review of the CUSMA, as well as bilateral concerns,” said Jean-S\u00e9bastien Comeau, director of communications for the \u200cminister’s office.<\/p>\n
This is the first \u2060time the trade representatives will be meeting this year, although they had spoken occasionally over the phone, LeBlanc had said last week.<\/p>\n
They last \u2060met in October.<\/p>\n
Canada is also hoping to reduce tariffs on key sectors including steel and aluminum, automobiles and parts, copper products and lumber and wood products that have led to \u200bjob losses \u200bin Canada, although almost 90% of overall exports have \u200bbeen flowing into the U.S. duty \u200cfree due to the USMCA pact, data shows.<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump has previously said that he could ditch the trilateral deal as it was irrelevant for the United States, and could strike separate deals with Canada and Mexico instead.<\/p>\n
Last week, during a fireside chat, LeBlanc had said that Canada was negotiating with the U.S. to remove tariffs on some \u200caffected sectors, and a deal could be folded into \u200bbilateral pacts alongside a review of the free \u200btrade agreement.<\/p>\n
U.S. Trade Representative Greer has \u200bpreviously said that negotiations with Canada were \u201cmore challenging,\u201d citing unresolved barriers \u200csuch as restrictions on dairy and milk \u200bmarkets and U.S. wine \u200band spirits sales.<\/p>\n
Canada and the U.S. have not officially started the review process of the USMCA, although the U.S. has already kicked it off with Mexico.<\/p>\n
U.S. and \u200bMexican negotiators will hold bilateral \u200cdiscussions starting the week of March 16 as part of the joint review \u200bof the trade agreement, the U.S. Trade Representative’s office said on Thursday.<\/p>\n
(Reporting \u200bby Promit Mukherjee; Editing by Andrea Ricci )<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Promit Mukherjee OTTAWA, March 6 (Reuters) – Canada’s minister in charge of trade relations with the U.S.,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518538,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[49,48,30879,204877,44,5443,21128,204878],"class_list":{"0":"post-518537","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-canada","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-dominic-leblanc","11":"tag-minister39s-office","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-trade-agreement","14":"tag-trade-relations","15":"tag-trade-representatives"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518537","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=518537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}