Canada wants to conclude a free trade agreement with Southeast Asia as quickly as possible. The country wants to strengthen economic ties with other countries because of the American import tariffs.
That said Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand on Thursday at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Kuala Lumpur. Like many other countries, Canada wants to become less dependent on the American market due to growing trade restrictions from the US.
To achieve this, the country is investing heavily in infrastructure to promote exports to Asia. For example, a pipeline was expanded to better reach Asian countries such as South Korea, Japan and India, and a large LNG project was recently launched in the Canadian province of British Columbia.
Although a trade agreement has now been concluded between the United States, Canada and Mexico, President Donald Trump has imposed heavy import duties on, among other things, steel, aluminum and cars.
That is bad news for the North American country, because they are important Canadian export products. “These tariffs affect us, and we think they are unfair,” Anand told the news agency Bloomberg.
US and Canada continue to talk
The minister said that Canada continues to talk with the US to resolve the tensions. At the end of last month, Trump announced that he wanted to end all trade talks with Canada, because the Canadian government wanted to introduce a digital services tax for the US.
Canada has now withdrawn the tax and trade talks between the countries are in full swing again.
That is beneficial for both countries, because the neighboring countries are still strongly dependent on each other: Canada is the largest buyer of American goods. Last year, the country imported $349 billion worth of products from the US.
At the same time, Canada exported $413 billion worth of goods to the US, making it the third largest exporter to the US market.