Justin Trudeau wants to revive UK-Canada trade talks in shadow of Trump

He called on the U.K. to get back to the negotiating table after London walked away from bilateral trade talks last January.

Negotiations to replace a post-Brexit U.K.-Canada rollover deal collapsed after a long-running battle by Canadian farmers to get hormone-treated beef into Britain.

The fight led to British cheese farmers losing their preferred access to the Canadian market and some U.K. carmakers facing extra tariffs at Canada’s border.

“It would be helpful to take another go at that and see what we can accomplish in the shortest possible time,” Goodale said. “If we can add on to it, so much the better,” he said, with priority areas being science and tech and innovation, quantum computing and AI.

Snags in the bilateral talks have also posed a barrier to Canada’s ratification of Britain’s membership of the Indo-Pacific CPTPP trade bloc.

But the U.K. wants to diversify trade beyond Europe — and Canada is eager to move beyond a reliance on the United States.