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The challenges facing the deal are already significant. A concerted push from U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and various business groups to win support for the agreement has faced stiff resistance from trade unions and Democrats who have called for changes to provisions on labour standards and drug patents.

The AFL-CIO, the U.S.’s largest federation of unions has said it won’t support the pact in its current form and the United Steelworkers union has said it should not be ratified until tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum are dropped.

“All the NAFTA renegotiation efforts in the world will not create U.S. jobs, raise U.S. wages or reduce the U.S. trade deficit if the new rules do not include clear, strong and effective labor rules that require Mexico to abandon its low wage policy,” Celeste Drake of the AFL-CIO said at a House Ways and Means subcommittee hearing Tuesday.

Canada and Mexico are important but at the end of the day this is a domestic issue now

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland added her own pressure to the process a day earlier, warning that Canadians would be “very troubled’ by any move to ratify the deal with the US tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum in place.

“The existence of these tariffs for many Canadians raises some serious questions about NAFTA ratification,” she told reporters following a meeting with Lighthizer.

Removing the tariffs — issued under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 — would go some distance to easing the path to ratification, analysts said. The levies are unpopular with both political parties in the U.S. and Republican Senators Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Rob Portman of Ohio have introduced competing legislation that seeks limit the President’s use of them. A congressional review of Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 is also underway.