Trucks cross the Blue Water Bridge between Port Huron, Mich., and Sarnia, Ont., carrying goods between the U.S. and Canada last year.Emily Elconin/Reuters
The United States’ top trade official says he expects negotiations over the North American free-trade pact to extend beyond July 1, and to ultimately result in separate arrangements with Canada and Mexico built on top of the existing trilateral agreement.
In an event on Tuesday in Washington, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer laid out his expectations for the review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is scheduled to take place this summer.
A key question heading into the review is whether the deal will survive as a trilateral pact, or be split into two separate bilateral agreements. U.S. President Donald Trump has called the agreement “irrelevant” and has mused about leaving it.
“Our baseline is that things have to be changed,” Mr. Greer said about the USMCA, which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement in 2020 and governs trade between the three countries. But he suggested the core of the agreement would likely remain in place, while the U.S. would look to address specific bilateral grievances with Canada and Mexico in separate side agreements.
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The existing agreement has “a bunch of load-bearing pillars” that function well, Mr. Greer said. “If we get rid of them, I just have to go back and do it again.”
“But we do have to have some kind of a protocol or something with Mexico, and one with Canada separately, I think, to deal with issues specific to those countries,” he said.
“Our import-export profile is different with each country, the labour situation in each country is different, the reasons why we have deficits with these countries are different. So it necessitates two separate protocols that we can, I think, layer over those load-bearing pillars of USMCA.”
The U.S. has been working closely with Mexico over the past year to address a range of bilateral irritants – both trade and non-trade issues, such as drug cartels and illegal immigration. Last month, Mr. Greer’s office, known as USTR, began “technical discussions” with its Mexican counterparts about rules of origin, foreign investment and tariffs.
Canada’s trade team in Washington, led by chief negotiator Janice Charette and ambassador Mark Wiseman, has re-engaged with the Trump administration over the past month after several months of virtually no contact. But formal USMCA review talks between Washington and Ottawa have yet to start.
Mr. Greer said Tuesday that he expects bilateral negotiations with both partners to continue past the formal review date this summer.
“I think that we aren’t probably going to be able to resolve all issues by July 1, but I think we are on track to resolve many of them and to move as quickly as we can,” he said.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, pictured outside the White House on April 2, says USMCA talks will continue past July 1.Alex Wong/Getty Images
The agreement lays out three possible paths forward. On July 1, the partners can agree to renew the deal for 16 years. If they don’t, they begin a process of annual reviews that continue for 10 years, after which the agreement ends. Any of the three partners can also withdraw from the agreement with six months’ notice.
Mr. Greer suggested that the U.S. will pursue the second option.
“On July 1, what has to happen is the United States tells Canada and Mexico what we intend to do. Do we intend to just rubber-stamp this thing and say, ‘All right, renewed, everything’s fine. Let’s hold hands and move on’?” he said.
“Or do we say, ‘This is not sufficient, we have to have modifications to this agreement, we have to change it’? And so we’ll enter into a period, we’ll be on the path to going out [of the agreement], which is actually a 10-year period. But we’ll be in negotiations during that time and try to resolve some things sooner rather than later.”
Mr. Greer has to report to Congress on June 1, a month ahead of the formal review date, to lay out the Trump administration’s plans.
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Both Canadian and Mexican officials have said they want to retain the trilateral structure of the USMCA, while acknowledging that some issues will need to be addressed bilaterally with the United States.
“We’ve said all along that there will be a bilateral element to these discussions, and there will also be a trilateral element,” Dominic LeBlanc, minister responsible for Canada-U.S. trade, told reporters last week.
The Trump administration has not sought formal trade promotion authority from Congress, so its ability to alter the text of the USMCA itself is limited. A common view among trade experts is that the U.S. will use side letters to the agreement, backed by executive actions, to try to achieve its goals.
Mr. Greer has previously outlined various trade grievances with Canada and Mexico.
For Canada, these have included dairy quota allocation, digital streaming rules and provincial bans on U.S. liquor. An updated list, published by USTR last week, added several more, including Canada’s move to establish sovereign cloud computing infrastructure, Buy Canadian policies and provincial government procurement rules that exclude U.S. companies.
For Mexico, U.S. grievances include the use of “third-country content” in manufactured goods, the enforcement of labour laws and the country’s restrictions on investment in the energy sector.
Mr. Greer has also said he will push for more structural changes to the agreement that will apply to all three countries. These include tighter rules of origin (which lay out how much of a product must be made in North America to trade duty-free), as well as more alignment on external tariffs, screening of inbound investment and export controls.
Over the past year, the Trump administration has placed sectoral tariffs on a range of industries, including steel, aluminum, automobiles and forest products – in contravention of side agreements that were reached during the original USMCA negotiations. It has also placed tariffs on products that don’t meet the trade agreement’s rules of origin. The future of both types of tariffs will be a key issue in the USMCA review talks.