(May 12): Canada expects to conclude free trade agreements with the Philippines and the wider Southeast Asian bloc this year, as Ottawa seeks to boost business ties with the region and grow its non-US trade.
“Negotiations are really going well,” visiting Canadian International Trade Minister Maninder Sidhu said in an interview on Tuesday, after meeting with Philippine Trade Secretary Cristina Roque and Finance Secretary Frederick Go.
Sidhu said Canada is also joining the Luzon Economic Corridor, a project backed by the US and Japan and where Ottawa is putting in C$2 million (US$1.5 million or $1.9 million). “It sends a signal to the Canadian businesses out there that want to look at investing in the Luzon Economic Corridor that Canada’s skin is in the game.”
Potential investments include data centre, logistics and energy, he said.
In pursuing free trade with the Philippines, Canada is looking at Manila’s expanding middle class, which bodes well with its agriculture exports, according to the minister.
Canada and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations agreed to start free trade talks in late 2021, when “the world was in a different place,” Sidhu said. Prime Minister Mark Carney is committed to diversifying the nation’s trading partners and there’s a political will to conclude the Canada-Asean FTA, he added.
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Carney last year laid out a strategy to double Canada’s exports to markets outside the US within a decade to net an extra C$300 billion in trade.
Sidhu, who is also scheduled to meet with Manila’s Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr, said Canada similarly wants to be a defense supplier to the Philippines which is aiming to modernize its military capabilities. Canada and the Philippines signed a visiting forces agreement last year, and it deployed troops during the annual flagship US-Philippines military drills that ended last week.
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