[ferro-alloys.com]Canadian foreign minister Chrystia Freeland will be in Washington Tuesday to discuss trade, a government official from Canada confirmed.

The official said Freeland is currently in Washington for "NAFTA talks." The source did not comment as to whether the talks will be trilateral.

The US Trade Representative did not immediately respond to a request asking for more details on the talks and whether Mexico would be involved. A spokeswoman from the embassy of Mexico did not return a request asking if Mexico will be present.

The US and Mexico reached a preliminary agreement on trade Monday.

US President Donald Trump said Monday that the two were scrapping the name NAFTA, instead choosing to call it the "United States-Mexico Trade Agreement," due to negative connotations with the word "NAFTA."

Trump, after announcing the US-Mexico deal, also said that talks with Canada would begin pretty much immediately, but said that he was open to either having Canada join the US-Mexico agreement or pursuing a separate deal with Canada. Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto stressed that he wanted a trilateral deal when talking with Trump August 27.

There was hope in the steel and aluminum industries that a renegotiated trade deal could mean removing Section 232 tariffs on those metals from Mexico and Canada as an agreement is reached. However, the preliminary trade agreement reached by the US and Mexico will not remove the existing US Section 232 tariffs on Mexican metals imports in its current state, Mexican Economy Secretary Ildefonso Guajardo said Monday.

"Mexico and Canada's interest are that if we arrived at a safe port with the signing of an agreement before the end of the year by November, that we will solve this contentious issue," Guajardo said in a webcast media briefing from Washington DC. "We are still stranded on this issue...but we don't discard the possibility on the horizon, closer to the signing, that we retake this dialog to find a solution," Guajardo said.

Canada has also called for Section 232 tariffs to be removed, imposing retaliatory tariffs on US goods in June.

Both Canada and Mexico are major partners in steel and aluminum supply chains.

• [Editor:王可]