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Trump’s top trade negotiator disputes Canadian assertion that U.S. made last-minute demands

The Trump administration’s top trade negotiator on Wednesday disputed Ottawa’s assertion that last-minute demands from the U.S. derailed a trade deal between the two countries, saying Canadian negotiators’ concerns about the deal’s “implementation” led Ottawa to pull the plug.

In an interview with CBC News, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the Canadian side had new requests when his counterpart, Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc, returned from Ottawa after the tentative deal was struck on Aug. 18.

“We had agreed to, as I’ve shared before in the press, really the best deal available to any country on the planet with respect to Canada,” Greer told CBC News chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton in his first one-on-one interview with a Canadian news outlet since trade talks broke down on Friday.

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