NAFTA Talks Heat Up This Week

NAFTA talks heat up again this week when U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland and Mexican Economy Secretary Ildefonso Guajardo meet again in Washington D.C. Lighthizer said he is aiming to conclude an agreement within two weeks to meet congressional deadlines for passage of a deal this year.

Several contentious issues remain unresolved after more than eight months of talks between the U.S., Mexico and Canada to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Despite insisting that he wants to secure a deal in the coming weeks, Lighthizer hasn’t shown signs of softening on proposals that Canada and Mexico see as damaging to their interests. Guajardo and Freeland, meanwhile, have pledged to stand their ground.

“You can’t say to the other side of the table, ‘You give us everything we want, and by the way the clock is ticking, so you only have 24 hours to do it,’” said Carla Hills, the former U.S. Trade Representative who negotiated NAFTA under President George H. W. Bush in the early 1990s. “It just won’t work that way.”

Lighthizer is pushing to get a NAFTA deal to meet deadlines for the U.S. House and Senate to debate and approve an agreement this year. Waiting until 2019, when a new Congress takes over, “changes the whole way you have to kind of construct the deal,” he said last week.

The U.S. official is fresh off a trip to Beijing, where two days of trade discussions ended with China agreeing to keep on talking, and little else. The U.S. asked China to reduce support for high-tech industries and help cut a trade deficit in goods that reached a record $375 billion last year, according to a document seen by Bloomberg.