LILLEY: Trade talks collapsed in fine print, and both sides say the other is to blame
· Toronto Sun
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The Americans claim Canada made last-minute changes that killed the trade deal. Ottawa says Washington did the same thing. The truth is that once negotiators started putting the details on paper, both sides discovered they didn’t agree on what had supposedly been settled.
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Canadian officials entered Friday believing a deal was all but done. By midnight, the negotiations had collapsed .
Changes on autos were not the only reason Canada walked away from the trade deal. There were other changes that, as Prime Minister Mark Carney said on Saturday, made the deal unacceptable.
“The cumulative effect of US demands revealed the limits of their commitment to a true economic partnership,” Carney said.
Carney cited Canadian sovereignty on issues such as who we could have trade deals with and French-language policies. As with details on the auto front, the Americans are telling a different story, but with clarification, it becomes two different readings of the same events.
Add in some politics and some bluster, and you have the perfect recipe for talks falling apart.
As recently as Thursday, Canada’s team in Washington, led by Minister Dominic LeBlanc, were all smiles, telling any stakeholder who would listen that he was sure of getting a deal.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford was less than enthused about the deal but hadn’t said no. Quebec, meanwhile, was reluctantly willing to accept an American demand to allow changes to supply management that would see dairy quotas altered, allowing Canadian retailers to import American cheese directly. Quebec’s view was simple: accept the dairy concession or face new tariffs that would hit the province even harder.
When talks resumed Friday, things became rocky. By Friday night, there were a series of frantic calls, texts and emails between federal officials, the PM and the premiers before, finally, the talks were called off not long before midnight .
Negotiations start out with people talking; they end with details being written down and approved by both sides.
The auto dispute that changed everything
The Americans agreed to reduce the current 25% tariff on Canadian autos to 15%. On the Canadian side, they believed that meant all Canadian-produced autos.
When discounts for American parts were included, that could bring the effective tariff for a finished car or truck down to somewhere between 7% and 7.5%. That’s still higher than Canada’s industry wanted, but it was better than what they were currently dealing with.
The Canadian side asked for all CUSMA-compliant parts to be included in the discount, which would have brought the effective tariff closer to 5% and made it feasible to continue producing cars and trucks in Canada.
The Americans said no.
Then the Canadian side noticed something in the details of the draft agreement. The drop from a 25% tariff down to 15% would not apply to medium- and heavy-duty trucks, such as the Chevy Silverado produced in Oshawa or Ford’s F-Series Super Duty trucks that its plant in Oakville will soon start producing.
The Canadian side cried foul, saying that’s not what they agreed to. The Americans refused to change it. Both sides now claim the other asked for that last-minute change. In reality, it’s just a different reading of the same facts.
Both sides say they are right
It’s the same in trying to figure out who is right about issues surrounding French-language policy. Carney said the Americans continually brought up restricting protections for the French language, but Donald Trump went on social media to claim this wasn’t true.
“I would never interfere with Canadians speaking French! In fact, I have never even thought of doing such a stupid thing,” Trump posted to Truth Social .
“This lie was made up by a weak and ineffective Prime Minister in an attempt to gain political support, which he has totally lost, from the people of Quebec.”
Carney may be playing this issue for political gain, but he has not lost political support in Quebec. As for the Americans, they did try to push back on protections for the French language.
Washington completely opposes the Online Streaming Act, which forces streaming giants, almost all American, to ensure the discoverability of Canadian content and specifically French-language content. There are many problems with this act, but there is no way Canada should allow another country to dictate language or cultural policies.
That would, in essence, be giving up Canadian sovereignty.
So no, the Americans didn’t try to stop anyone from speaking French in Canada. They didn’t even ask for changes to French labelling on goods sold here. When Jamieson Greer says it was about Netflix, he’s right, but so is Carney when he says they made demands on French-language protections.
The deal died in the details
Both governments insist the other side moved the goalposts.
“That sounds like me,” Trump told CNN reporter Jim Sciutto on Tuesday when asked about the Canadian claims that the Americans made last-minute changes.
Those changes, and the hammering out of details, are why we went from a Canadian government confident a deal was coming on Thursday to one that was bringing the negotiating team home Friday night.