Canada's trade minister, Mary Ng, announced that Canada will launch a USMCA dispute with the U.S. over the continued antidumping and countervailing duties on some Canadian softwood lumber exports.
Learn from the lessons of the failed Trans-Pacific Partnership, warned trade skeptics Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, in a letter they and other signatories released publicly Aug. 2. They said binding commitments in either the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, or reached with Latin American partners, are not legal without congressional say-so. "The administration’s many public declarations about the proposed IPEF process seem to indicate that it plans to negotiate a binding agreement while circumventing congressional input, authority, and approval," they wrote.
In filings at the USMCA Secretariat, Mexico and Canada say the Uniform Regulations for USMCA are clear, and say that " roll-up applies to the calculation of [regional value content] RVC for a vehicle. It obliges Parties to take 'no account' of the non-originating materials contained in an originating good when that good is used in the subsequent production of another good."
Although President Joe Biden criticized President Donald Trump's China tariffs on the campaign trail, Peterson Institute for International Economics Senior Fellow Chad Bown said he always thought it was unlikely Biden would roll any of them back, because there are "huge political costs" to doing so, because opponents could label you as "weak on China."
Senate Finance Committee members praised the experience of Doug McKalip, the administration's nominee to be chief agricultural negotiator in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. McKalip, a senior adviser on international trade policy and other matters to the agriculture secretary, is a career staffer at USDA.
Although climate advocate Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., has hopes of introducing a bipartisan carbon border adjustment tax, he said it may take American exports being hit with carbon border tariffs in Europe to get Congress to move.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai asked for consultations with Mexico over a 2021 amendment to Mexico's Electric Power Industry Law that privileges the state-owned electric utility, and over 2019 and June 2022 actions that privilege PEMEX, Mexico's state-owned oil and gas company.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said that all the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) partner countries met July 13 and 14 in Singapore for the first real discussions of the issues covered by the framework. The agency said the 165 delegates had positive and constructive dialogue.
Just as the U.S. trade representative declined to continue work toward a traditional free trade agreement with the U.K. begun during the previous administration, current USTR Katherine Tai announced July 14 that trade talks with Kenya will deal with trade facilitation, digital trade, science-based sanitary and phytosanitary rules and rooting out forced labor in supply chains -- not reducing tariffs on either side.
A World Trade Organization arbitrator determined the methodology Canada can use to set the level of retaliatory measures it can impose on goods imported from the U.S. if the U.S. applies countervailing duties on Canadian goods based on a measure found to be inconsistent with WTO rules. In the July 13 decision, the arbitrator said Canada would set the appropriate level of nullification or impairment in the future "based on the four-variety Armington model," which was recommended by the U.S. and can quantify the trade decline experienced by Canada through a particular use of the U.S.'s adverse facts available measures in CVD proceedings.