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LONDON — Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is angling to revive long-shelved trade talks with the United Kingdom, as Ottawa tries to build up alliances in the shadow of Donald Trump’s trade war.
The U.S. president pulled back from imposing punishing tariffs on Canadian goods on Monday, with Trudeau securing a one-month stay of execution for Canadian imports by striking a deal with Trump to further crack down on illegal migration and drug trafficking at the U.S.-Canada border.
But as the U.S. tariff threat continues to loom, “we now have both a great opportunity and a great reason to work really hard at trade diversification,” Canadian High Commissioner to the U.K., Ralph Goodale told POLITICO in an interview.
He called on the U.K. to get back to the negotiating table after London walked away from bilateral trade talks last January.
Negotiations to replace a post-Brexit U.K.-Canada rollover deal collapsed after a long-running battle by Canadian farmers to get hormone-treated beef into Britain.
The fight led to British cheese farmers losing their preferred access to the Canadian market and some U.K. carmakers facing extra tariffs at Canada’s border.
“It would be helpful to take another go at that and see what we can accomplish in the shortest possible time,” Goodale said. “If we can add on to it, so much the better,” he said, with priority areas being science and tech and innovation, quantum computing and AI.
Canadian election looms
Snags in the bilateral talks have also posed a barrier to Canada’s ratification of Britain’s membership of the Indo-Pacific CPTPP trade bloc.
But the U.K. wants to diversify trade beyond Europe — and Canada is eager to move beyond a reliance on the United States.
Restarting the bilateral trade negotiations “would be one step” towards that, Goodale argued.
Yet he acknowledged reviving the talks could be difficult for Keir Starmer’s Labour government. “We realize we’re dealing with a new government with a different set of priorities and it may take them a while to do the internal consideration that they need to do, and that’s understandable,” Goodale said.
It’s not just the U.K. government that faces hurdles to getting the talks back on track.
Canada’s parliament is currently prorogued as Trudeau’s Liberal party holds a leadership race after he announced at the start of this year his plans to resign as the country prepares for a general election in 2025.
The party, which is languishing in the polls, will choose its new leader and prime minister of Canada on March 9 with Former Canadian and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney and Trudeau’s former Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland as the front runners to replace him.
Canada’s government is required to hold a general election this year before the end of October.
“In the meantime, we do have a trade agreement in place that is pretty darn good,” Goodale said.
