Canada and US resume trade talks after months-long pause

Canada's minister for US-Canada trade, Dominic LeBlanc, is in Washington on Friday for meetings with Trump administration officials — the first high-level talks between the two countries since negotiations broke down late last year. LeBlanc will be meeting with US trade representative Jamieson Greer to discuss the US-Canada-Mexico free trade agreement, also known as the USMCA, which is under a mandatory review this year, his office said. Formal trade talks between Canada and the US were suspended in October by President Donald Trump over an anti-tariff advert run by the province of Ontario. Trump has since mulled scrapping the USMCA, or carving out separate deals with Canada and Mexico. Canada and Mexico, however, have both said that they would like the long-standing North American free trade agreement to remain in place. "This government is very worried about the future of the bilateral relationship with the United States, the consequences of a zombie CUSMA or the shredding of CUSMA," said Prime Minister Mark Carney this week, using the Canadian term for the USMCA. Carney added that the free trade agreement "effectively has been broken in the short term by US actions". The USMCA h