Monday morning President Trump sat in the Oval Office and announced his plans to replace the existing North American Free Trade Agreement with a new agreement between the United States and Mexico.
"I'll be terminating the existing deal and going into this deal," the president said, calling it a "big day for trade."
However where Canada's future in the agreement takes place is still up in the air with Trump saying there is a possibility of separate agreements. "We are starting negotiations with Canada pretty much immediately," he said.
Trump also announced that he wanted to get rid of the name “NAFTA” and instead call it the "United States-Mexico Trade Agreement."
“It has a bad connotation because the United States was hurt very badly by NAFTA," Trump said about the reason for the name change.
Trump and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto have been reportedly working together for the past five weeks to "iron out their bilateral differences" so Canada can rejoin the NAFTA update.
Spokesman for Canada's foreign minister, Adam Austen said, "We're glad Mexico and the U.S. continue to work out their bilateral issues. It's the only way we'll get to a deal."
The U.S. and Mexico worked to finalize an agreement this month so that it could be signed before Mexican President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s inauguration in December.
Both Mexico and Canada have said they want to keep the three-nation trade deal that came into force in 1994, but Trump said he was open to negotiating deals with each country separately.
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