NAFTA Negotiations Seen by Analyst as Unlikely to Conclude This Weekend

Even as President Donald Trump and a top Mexican negotiator suggest that NAFTA could be resolved on Sept. 8, Canada's Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland continued to sidestep questions about how close Canada is to arriving at a deal. "My negotiating counterparty is Ambassador [Robert] Lighthizer. I think that question is really to the president," she said. "We're making progress."

Bill Reinsch, Scholl chair in international business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he's not expecting a resolution this weekend. "The gossip has not been [an agreement] soon," he said. "It seems to me, there’s mounting pressure from business, from labor … and increasingly from the Hill, saying if Canada’s not in, it’s not a victory." So, he said, Canada will stall, hoping that pressure leads to a softening of U.S. positions. "The real deadline is like Sept. 29," he said, adding that he thinks it will take all that time.

While he expects a trilateral deal in the end, he's not sure if it will lead to more North American trade or to a continuation of the status quo. "It’s hard to tell at this point. The administration has done what all administrations do, release the good stuff early and hang on to the fine print," he said.

He said dairy quotas and tariffs can be resolved. "That one is about numbers. When it’s about numbers, you can always get to a deal eventually," he said. But on Chapter 19, even though it goes all the way back to before NAFTA, to the original Canada-U.S. free trade deal, he thinks it's harder to reach a compromise. Either dispute resolution over trade remedy laws is binding or it's not, he said.