OTTAWA, April 23 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump has not mentioned the concept of Canada paying an “entry fee” before a scheduled review of the United States-Mexico-Canada trade deal can start, Prime Minister Mark Carney said on Thursday.
The three nations are due to finish their work by July 1, but the schedule has been complicated by U.S.-Canadian tensions over tariffs that Trump imposed on key imports from Canada last year. The United States has already outlined concessions it wants Canada to make now, an approach some domestic media and commentators say is equivalent to demanding an entry fee to the review.
“I don’t know where the talk of an entry fee is from. It’s certainly not coming from me, it’s not language I’ve ever used, and it’s not language I’ve ever heard from the president of the United States,” Carney told reporters.
“We’re not sitting here taking notes and taking instruction from the United States… we’re ready to go into detailed negotiations. We’re also ready to wait, if that’s what has to happen,” he said, adding he was still confident progress could be made.
Canadian officials say there is little chance of the review wrapping up by the July 1 deadline, and stress they want to address all the outstanding issues with the United States at the same time, rather than in piecemeal fashion.
“We’re not going to make a series of concessions… just to get to a table and have a statement appear on a website in the United States (and) then receive a whole second list of things that they’re going to want,” Dominic LeBlanc, the federal minister in charge of trade with the United States, told the Globe and Mail newspaper on Tuesday.
(Reporting by David Ljunggren and Promit Mukherjee; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
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