A report in iPolitics confirms that Canada and the EU remain in ongoing negotiations over the technical details of the recently announced Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement:
The EU’s ambassador to Canada updated the international trade committee Thursday on the status of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement’s (CETA) ongoing technical negotiations, saying she expects talks to be finalized within a few weeks. When Prime Minister Harper announced the conclusion of CETA from Brussels in October with European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, it was said that a deal had been reached on all the controversial issues.
What remained were the so-called “technical negotiations”, which were never completely explained and weren’t supposed to take that long anyway. A couple of months later they still aren’t quite done, but they’re apparently close. “What for the moment is happening is, we have the finalizing of technical negotiations going on, which I think is a question of weeks,” EU Ambassador Marie-Anne Coninsx said in response to a question from NDP trade critic Don Davies on Thursday.
The story also notes that the final text of the technical negotiations should be completed within six months but that it will take two years to complete the final treaty text in the 23 official languages of the treaty signatories.
