OTTAWA—So close and yet so far.

At a news conference announcing tough trade counter-measures against the U.S., Prime Minister Justin Trudeau revealed he offered last Friday to meet U.S. President Donald Trump to sign off on a final few details in a new NAFTA deal, but Trump refused without a guarantee Canada would offer a key concession: a five-year expiry date on the deal.

“There was the broad outlines of a decent win-win-win deal on the table that I thought required that final deal-making moment,” Trudeau said.

But a face-to-face meeting between Trudeau, who has invested a huge amount of political capital in developing a working relationship with the mercurial Trump, was scrapped.

“I got a call from Vice-President Pence on Tuesday in which it was impressed upon me that there was a precondition to us being able to get together: that Canada would accept a sunset clause for NAFTA.”

Trudeau said he made clear to Pence that was an unreasonable demand.

“The United States said, as a precondition of us meeting and negotiating, we would have to accept a sunset clause. I said we could not accept a sunset clause in NAFTA as a precondition to meeting or as any sort of condition, but that, if they were willing to take that off the precondition list, I would be happy to come down. But that was not something that could ever be acceptable to Canada, or, I’m fairly certain, to Mexico, in the renegotiation of a North American Free Trade Agreement.”

As a result, the likelihood that Canada, the U.S. and Mexico will reach a modernized NAFTA deal seemed more remote than ever Thursday after the U.S. slapped tariffs against its North American partners and drew swift retaliation from Canada and Mexico.

Canada has levied tariffs and taxes against a whole range of U.S.-origin products, including steel, aluminum, and all kinds of manufactured products used by consumers, goods ranging from yogurt and jam to cosmetics and toilet brushes.

In all, some $16.6-billion worth of U.S. products will be targeted.

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland called it the most significant trade action Canada has taken in the post-world war era.

Although Trudeau told reporters, “We continue to be open to working on a renewed and modernized NAFTA,” and said Canada’s negotiating team remains ready to sit down at the NAFTA table, the prime minister made clear to Trump and Pence the steel and aluminum tariffs were “unacceptable” and lacked a “common sense” rationale.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says in response to “punitive” U.S. tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, Canada has no choice but to retaliate. The government says it is slapping tariffs on up to $16.6 billion in U.S. imports. (The Canadian Press)

Trudeau did not say he outlined the specific countermeasures Canada would take — tit-for-tat 25 per cent tariffs on U.S. steel and 10 per cent tariffs on U.S. aluminum plus measures against other American goods — but he said he did make clear the Canada-U.S. trading relationship was at stake.

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“We talked about how difficult this was going to be in terms of a turning point in the Canada-U.S. relationship,” Trudeau told reporters.

Asked why all his economic arguments failed with the U.S. President, Trudeau replied, “You’ll have to ask the president about that.”

Trudeau said, at this point, “all indications” are that Trump will still show up for next week’s G7 summit, but the American president’s new tariffs also hit the European Union, including France, Germany and Italy, and, for the moment, Britain.

Trump’s commerce secretary Wilbur Ross called the tariffs “a blip” in U.S. trade relations, but Trudeau and Freeland adamantly disagreed. Freeland said this was “specious,” and they were “serious” and Trudeau called them “an affront.”

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