Negotiators from Canada, Mexico, and the United States are gathering in Montreal beginning today to try to negotiate a revised North American Free Trade Agreement. The negotiations are proceeding on a tighter timetable, with a goal to complete them before Mexico’s presidential election this summer.

According to The New York Times, Mexico and Canada are expected to offer counterproposals to the demands made by the US, which are directed primarily at reducing the US trade deficit with its NAFTA partners by reforming local content and government procurement rules. The business communities in Mexico and Canada, as well as the negotiators for those two countries criticized the US proposals as potentially fatal to the effort to update the agreement. The mood following the last couple of rounds of NAFTA negotiations has generally been negative and President Donald Trump has renewed his threat to pull the US out of the pact.

The president struck his usual statesmanlike pose on Twitter last week, calling NAFTA “a bad joke.”

….The Wall will be paid for, directly or indirectly, or through longer term reimbursement, by Mexico, which has a ridiculous $71 billion dollar trade surplus with the U.S. The $20 billion dollar Wall is “peanuts” compared to what Mexico makes from the U.S. NAFTA is a bad joke!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 18, 2018