The U.S. and Canada were preparing to announce a dramatic, last-minute deal Sunday on revising the North American Free Trade agreement, lifting a cloud of uncertainty over the quarter-century-old continental commercial bloc.
The pending agreement will allow Canada to join an accord reached in late August between the U.S. and Mexico and diminishes the prospects for President Donald Trump to follow through on his threats either to kill Nafta outright or to break the trilateral pact into separate pieces.
The surprising Washington-Ottawa accord came just four days after Trump’s trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, told Congress that the gaps between the two countries appeared too great to bridge in time to meet the U.S.-imposed Sunday deadline, and that the administration was prepared to keep moving down the path of a Mexico-only agreement.
Sunday’s last-minute progress followed an intensive few days of commercial diplomacy on the sidelines of the United Nations meetings in New York, with Mexican officials scrambling to negotiate a truce between their feuding partners, and Trump’s son-in-law, adviser Jared Kushner, helping to broker the deal. The Sunday talks culminated more than 13 months of on-again,-off-again negotiations among the three nations seeking to overhaul the trade accord Trump regularly called “a disaster” for U.S. workers and manufacturers.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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