Negotiators from Canada and the United States went down to the wire but were able to reach an agreement on a new free trade pact that will include Mexico, the governments announced late on Sunday night.
The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) updates and replaces the nearly 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which US President Donald Trump had labelled a disaster and promised to cancel.
The rewrite “will result in freer markets, fairer trade and robust economic growth in our region,” according to a joint statement from US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland.
After more than a year of talks, and six weeks of intense discussions, the governments were able to overcome their differences with both sides conceding some ground, but both hailing the agreement as a good deal for their citizens in the region of 500 million residents that conducts about one trillion US dollars in trade a year.
Al Jazeera’s Heidi Zhou-Castro, reporting from Washington DC, said the US is trumpeting this as a win for all three nations involved.
“This is the fulfilment one of Trump’s most important campaign promises, this is the president who prides in calling himself “the deal maker”, and this is a win for his ‘America first’ policy,” she said.
“He had long complained that NAFTA was costing US manufacturing jobs and that it was leading to this trade deficit with Mexico.”
Canada will open its dairy market further to US producers, and Washington left unchanged the dispute settlement provisions which Ottawa demanded.
This will allow them to sign the agreement before Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto leaves office December 1, the date that was the cause of the last minute flurry of activity.
Under US law, the White House is required to submit the text of the trade deal to Congress 60 days before signing – and officials barely made it by midnight.
