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Trump’s withdrawal early in 2017 from the original group of 12 nations negotiating the TPP seemed to have buried the trade pact until the spring, when Japan, with support from Canada, resurrected talks focused on forging a deal without the United States.

Until the APEC incident, negotiators perceived that things were going smoothly, said Mitsuru Myochin, a counsellor with the Japanese government’s TPP team. “We still do not know why Canada changed their attitude,” he said

In the weeks leading up to the summit, the Canadian government had signalled to the country’s media that a deal in Vietnam was by no means assured, and in the wake of the leaders’ meeting he didn’t attend, Trudeau told Canadian reporters his reluctance to commit “should (have) come as no surprise and it actually didn’t come as a surprise to people who’d noticed that I was saying that and have been saying that all week.”

Photo by Shizuo Kambayashi / AP Photo

According to Japanese observers, however, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may not have been among them. “The prime minister was quite upset, from what I understand,” said Shujiro Urata, a trade expert at Waseda University. “And I think he has a reason to be moody.”

Ichiro Hara, director of the international affairs bureau at Keidanren, Japan’s business federation, said he spoke with an official who was inside the room for the meeting between Trudeau and Abe in which, immediately before the sit-down scheduled for all 11 leaders, Trudeau voiced his reservations.