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The collapsed trade deal between the European Union and Canada has been resuscitated after Belgium reached an agreement with leaders of the country’s southern region of Wallonia, who had refused to allow the country’s government to sign the pact, reached a political agreement to support it.
The agreement is an “important step for EU and Canada,” Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said in a post on Twitter on Thursday, adding that the nation’s regions will be able to formally approve the pact by the end of Friday.
The approval removes the last major obstacle for the EU and Canada to move ahead with one of the world’s most ambitious and far-reaching trade pacts.
The delay in concluding the deal raised concerns about the prospects of other agreements now under negotiation between the EU and the U.S. and Japan, as well as an accord with the U.K. over its future relationship with the bloc.
Belgium’s federal government had been unable to persuade the Wallonia regional parliament in the country’s French-speaking south to sign up to the proposed pact. The EU and Canada canceled a summit planned for Thursday at which the two sides would have signed the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, or CETA, which has taken seven years to negotiate.