Ottawa and Washington were close to a deal when U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly cut off trade talks last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney said on Monday.
Carney said there were "very detailed, very specific, very comprehensive" negotiations about steel, aluminum and energy trade before everything changed on Thursday.
"We stand by the progress that had been made, the government of Canada does, and we are ready, when appropriate, to pick that up," he said.
Speaking to reporters at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Malaysia, the prime minister said he hasn't heard from Trump since Thursday.
Trump said he ended the discussions because of an anti-tariff TV ad campaign the Ontario government has been running in U.S. markets. He called the ad, which features former president Ronald Reagan talking about tariffs, dishonest.
Carney spoke with Ontario Premier Doug Ford just before leaving for Malaysia and Ford agreed to pull the ads after the weekend.
Then on Saturday, Trump declared that he would add a 10 per cent tariff on top of existing levies on Canada because the ad was still running.
The two leaders will be at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum meetings later this week in South Korea but they do not intend to meet.
Trump, who left Malaysia for Japan on Monday, said he doesn't want to meet Carney at APEC and won't be meeting with him "for a while."
"I'm very happy with the deal we have right now with Canada. We're going to let it ride," he told reporters on Air Force 1.
When pressed for details on the additional 10 per cent tariffs, the president said he didn't know when it would kick in "but I don't really want to discuss it."
Carney and Trump appeared to be very cordial during a meeting at the Oval Office earlier this month, with Trump praising the prime minister as a "world-class leader" and saying he thought the Canadian negotiation team would be very happy with the deal.
When asked what he thought had gone wrong in his relationship with Trump, Carney said, "That's a question for him."
He did say Canadians should take Trump at his word that the ad campaign was the reason talks broke down. Some White House officials in recent days have said there were actually a series of frustrations with the Canadian negotiators.
Carney did not say whether he thought running the ad was a mistake.
"In any complicated, high-stakes negotiation, you can get unexpected twists and turns and you have to keep your cool during those situations. It doesn't pay to be upset," he said.
Carney said negotiations with the U.S. had shifted to focus on trade in specific sectors, rather than the broader economic and security pact he had been pitching during the spring and summer.
"The U.S. was less interested in the security element of the partnership, which is their decision," he said.
Carney also said the work he's been doing at the ASEAN summit to deepen partnerships with countries in the fast-growing region of Southeast Asia is part of the contingency plan his government has developed in light of Trump's trade war.
"Candidly, Canada has not focused on (those) relationships to the same extent as we should have in any trading environment with the United States, let alone a situation where they're changing their trade policy," he said.
The summit wrapped on Monday. Carney is headed to Singapore on Tuesday for a series of meetings with business leaders and a bilateral discussion with his counterpart, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong.
Picture Courtesy: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
