British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss speaks during a visit to McCulla Haulage to discuss the Northern Ireland protocol with businesses, in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, May 25, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP-Niall Carson/PA via APThe British foreign secretary has often been mocked for her preoccupation with cheese. It started eight years ago when Liz Truss expressed outrage in a speech to her party’s annual conference.Now Truss is facing another battle over cheese, this time with Canada.
When it was a European Union member, Britain was part of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Canada, giving it some access to Canada's cheese market. Goodale said the U.K.’s request for extra access for British cheese — on top of the access given to the EU — is “what the Canadian negotiators consider to be pretty much a dead end.”
In 2018, after the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement gave the U.S. fresh access to the Canadian dairy market, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he would compensate Canadian dairy farmers. This allows U.K. cheese exporters to access the Canadian market tariff-free under the EU portion of Canada’s World Trade Organization cheese tariff rate quota.
In March, U.K. Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan flew to Canada to announce with Canada’s Trade Minister Mary Ng that bilateral negotiations had officially begun. But she was also firm about the need to protect Canada’s dairy producers, and that means keeping more British cheese out.