Althea Raj

These are the things that we share with you, you know, like please continue to work on these things so that we can be partners together.

Um, because at the moment, I don't know that you could really argue that Europe is fit to lead the world at the moment.

I don't know that it's helpful, but I guess it depends what you mean by dead in the water.

Like the government has made it clear that for the first time, actually, I think it was two weeks ago that there are no negotiations happening.

You know, we had our ambassador to the U.S.

say very plainly that, you know, we're open and willing to negotiate whenever they are willing to call us to the table.

And we have the prime minister say we don't have the starter pistols.

The starter pistol belongs to the Americans.

We're waiting for them to tell us to come to the table.

And we don't want to come to the table on the terms that they've outlined at the moment, basically.

We're not ready to pre-negotiate against ourselves.

But is dead in the water just that it's status quo?

Because one of the other things that emerged over the last two weeks of April was Janice Charette, who's our lead trade negotiator on the Canada-US file, outline what her mandate has been.

which is to safeguard preferential market access to the United States, to get tariff relief on steel, aluminum, lumber, copper.

She also talked about how this has been the Canadian government's line since even under Justin Trudeau when they thought that a Democrat was going to win like Werner.

not renegotiating.

This is just like a temperature check.

We're just kind of sorting out some housekeeping issues.

We're not like totally re-upping this.

But at the same time, you know, like 20 minutes later in her remarks, they do acknowledge it's going to be a tough slog.