Trump hails Canada, Mexico trade pact

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump is hailing his revamped North American trade agreement with Canada and Mexico as a breakthrough for U.S. workers, vowing to sign it by late November while investors breathed a sigh of relief that the key pillars of NAFTA had survived his hardball strategy to reshape global commerce.

Washington and Ottawa reached an agreement on Sunday after weeks of tense bilateral talks to update the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. The United States had forged a separate trade deal with Mexico, the third member of NAFTA, in August.

The new agreement, called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), is aimed at bringing more jobs into the United States, with Canada and Mexico accepting more restrictive commerce with the United States, their main export customer.

“These measures will support many - hundreds of thousands - American jobs,” Trump said at the White House, describing the trade deal as “the most important” the United States had ever made.

“It means far more American jobs, and these are high-quality jobs,” he said. Trump had repeatedly called NAFTA a terrible deal for the United States.

U.S. President Donald Trump calls the pact the "most important deal we've ever made by far."

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says his country is in a more stable place now that it has completed a renegotiation of a free trade deal with the United States and Mexico.

The agreement was reached late Sunday and gives U.S. farmers greater access to the Canadian dairy market. But it keeps the former North American Free Trade Agreement dispute-resolution process that the U.S. wanted to jettison. It offers Canada protection if Trump goes ahead with plans to impose tariffs on cars, trucks and auto parts imported into the United States.

Trudeau says the deal needed to be fair and level the playing field given that one trading partner is 10 times larger. He says Canada did not accept "any deal."