LILLEY: As Trump lashes out, sources say Canadian side playing games
Mark Carney won the election by promising he was best positioned to deal with Donald Trump, but so far he hasn’t delivered
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Donald Trump says he’s having no luck with Canada on a new trade deal. That won’t be a shock to anyone familiar with how talks between Washington and Ottawa have been going.
On Friday though, Trump let loose on Canada and a whole pile of other topics while speaking with reporters.
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LILLEY: As Trump lashes out, sources say Canadian side playing games Back to video
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“We don’t have a deal with Canada,” Trump said.
“August 1 is going to come, and we will have most of our deals finished, if not all. We haven’t really had a lot of luck with Canada. I think Canada could be one where they’ll just pay tariffs. It’s not really a negotiation.”
That last part, that it’s not really a negotiation, is something I heard Thursday from the Canadian side – before Trump ever spoke.
“We haven’t put anything on the table,” said one source well-briefed on the talks.
The Americans want a deal with us, they’ve said so repeatedly, and time and again, both Canadian and American sources have said it is Canada’s negotiating team getting in the way.
“It should take half a day to get a deal done, we negotiated a deal with China in a weekend,” an American diplomat quipped in May.
Back then, a deal seemed possible.
In fact, at the beginning of June, government sources were saying that a deal was imminent. Both sides wanted to sign a deal before the G7 meetings in Kananaskis.
Somehow, it all fell apart.
There is plenty of blame to go around, and Trump will shoulder a great deal of that blame. He’s erratic, he’s unpredictable, his negotiating style is to create havoc to throw his negotiation partner off balance.
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All of that is true though for every other country in the world and those other countries are getting deals. Canada is not only not getting a deal, but our negotiating style is also irritating Trump to the point that he lashes out.
Some Canadians will take joy in irritating Trump, but I’m looking at the rising unemployment, especially in communities like Windsor that rely on the auto sector. Job one for the Carney government should be to protect the jobs of Canadians, not to leave them dangling as our negotiators play games.
A month ago, Prime Minister Mark Carney appointed Ambassador Kristen Hillman as Canada’s chief negotiator.
It’s time to pull her – she’s not getting the job done.
“She’s a wonk,” said one experienced government hand.
“She’s good at advising and putting issues into perspective. She’s not a negotiator,” said someone with experience working alongside Hillman on this file.
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The Americans are looking to secure a deal with us and instead of sending in a salesperson, a closer, we’re sending in the accounting team.
It won’t work.
We aren’t even trying to secure the same kind of deal. The Americans are looking for a deal in principle, a high-level deal in broad strokes, we are pushing for something more comprehensive than the Americans are interested in.
And at the same time as we say we want to negotiate a more comprehensive deal, we put nothing forward – everything is about waiting for them to move. The Americans, you may have noticed, are busy with other countries who want to negotiate. They don’t have time for teams playing games.
One source said that Hillman is playing a similar strategy to what the Canadian delegation used in renegotiating NAFTA in 2017. The problem with that is those tactics irritated the Americans so much that they froze us out, signed a deal with Mexico and we had to play catch up.
Mark Carney won the election by promising the public he was best positioned to deal with Donald Trump. So far, he hasn’t delivered – and that is hurting Canadian jobs and Canadian companies.
Enough of the games, it’s time for Carney to replace Hillman and send in someone who can and is willing to negotiate a deal.
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