Murray Wood: Who's hot... and who's not
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OTTAWA — Federal conservatives are calling on the government to release the full details of the trade offer from the United States that Canada rejected this week.
In a letter to Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc, Canada-U.S. relations critic Shuvaloy Majumdar said while his party supports the government’s decision to reject the deal, Parliament is in the dark on what was on the table.
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- What people are saying about the failed Canada-U.S. trade deal
- ‘We got attacked’: Carney vows retaliatory tariffs on U.S. will hit next month
Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended trade talks with the United States on Friday after accusing the U.S. administration of introducing measures in the final hours of negotiations that restricted Canada’s ability to do deals with other countries.
In an interview with the New York Times on Saturday, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the Americans offered, in part, to cut the 10 per cent tariffs on softwood lumber, and lower steel tariffs from 50 to 25 per cent.
Carney said on Saturday the U.S. also added terms near the end of negotiations that restricted Canada’s protections of language and culture.
“If there was a draft text of any agreement that both governments have seen, please release it. The U.S. administration has seen it. Your government has seen it. Canadians deserve to see it,” Majumdar wrote.
“Even after addressing Canadians and the media, the public and Members of Parliament still remain in the dark on your government’s demands in negotiations with the Trump administration.
Majumdar said he’s not asking for “negotiating secrets,” but rather information that both the Canadian and U.S. governments already know.
A spokesperson for the Bloc Québécois wouldn’t say whether they support the calls for the government to detail what the Americans were offering. But the party reiterated calls for a meeting between the “recognized” party leaders in the House of Commons to get a briefing on the situation.
“Canadians expect elected officials to collaborate in this moment, which is why we’ve made this request,” Julien Coulombe-Bonnafous told The Canadian Press in French, adding the Liberals haven’t responded to those calls.
In an interview with The Canadian Press, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May also said the party leaders should be briefed, but stopped short of demanding the trade details be made public.
“I think we should have at least a Zoom call or Teams meeting as we used to do under the former prime minister to make sure that we are all updated,” May said.
“I don’t care so much about what was on the table. I think we can read the tea leaves, we can see what was there. I think it was a bad deal and it was good we walked away. But the next steps and holding us united, it’s really important that we choose areas where we will land with consensus.”
“With respect to Ford’s new plant, for example, in Oakville, which is F-350s, 450s, 550s, they would have been excluded. GM, Silverado, same thing, would have been excluded from that,” Carney told reporters.
“No rationale, just for exclusion. So effectively moving into a series of terms that would have made the production more uneconomic over time.”
Spokespeople for both the prime minister and LeBlanc’s offices declined to comment on Greer’s claims, deferring instead to Carney’s remarks to reporters from Saturday.
In a post on his Truth Social account, Trump returned to mocking Canada as another U.S. state, saying “Canada wants the benefits of being a state, without being one.”
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