Mexican officials went out of their way yesterday to tell their Canadian counterparts not to read anything into the fact that their trade negotiators and the Americans are meeting bilaterally in Washington on Friday — that the new government in Mexico City isn't planning to cut a separate deal with the U.S. outside of NAFTA.
"The fact that this time we're going to Washington for a bilateral is just a sequence of things," said Mexico's Secretary of the Economy Ildefonso Guajardo, who handles the NAFTA file. He added that the Canadian and American negotiating teams also often hold two-way talks, and Friday's bilateral isn't an indication that Canada could be left out in the cold.
"It's just a method, not a direction," Guajardo continued. "We're not moving in the direction of a bilateral agreement. We still want a trilateral NAFTA."...
This was excerpted from the 26 July 2018 edition of CBC News.