CANADA'S CLARK SEES TRADE AS MOST URGENT PROBLEM Trade is the most urgent problem facing U.S.-Canadian relations because of a pressing need to reach a new bilateral pact within the coming months, Joe Clark, Canadian secretary of state for external affairs, said. Negotiators for the two countries have been meeting for more than a year in an effort to work out an agreement. "The most urgent problem now is the trade question because that has to be decided within the next 10 months," Clark told the Commonwealth Club of California. "We have a fast track authority from your Congress for approval or rejection of whatever the negotiators achieve." Clark said that, as a practical matter, an initial agreement must be reached by late September or early October. He listed environmental questions, particularly acid rain, and defense as the second and third most important bilateral issues facing Ottawa and Washington. On Wednesday, President Reagan announced that he will seek 2.5 billion dlrs from Congress to address the acid rain problem. Some interpreted the move as a goodwill gesture in advance of his annual meeting, on April 5-6 in Ottawa, with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. In a question-and-answer session with the public affairs group, Clark said that the two countries must find better mechanisms for resolving their trade disputes. "This rash of countervailing actions, where we acted on corn and you acted on soft wood and we both said they were quasijudicial -- the dispute resolution mechanisims in place now are not working adequately in either of our interests," he said. Ottawa also is seeking to change some of Washington's rules on government procurement that penalize Canadian businesses, he said. "There are a number of Canadian companies that, in order to secure substantial contracts in the United States, have had to move their head offices out of our country into your country because you have national procurement requirements," he said. In turn, he added, the United States would like to change some of the procurement requirements that exist at the provincial government level in Canada. Clark declined to forecast the outcome of the discussions. "What will come out of it remains for the negotiators, in the first instance, to propose, and then governments and congresses will have judge," he said. In his prepared remarks, Clark said that the United States has tended to take Canada for granted, although it exports to its northern neighbor more than twice what it exports to Japan. "Yet you bought almost 10 per cent more from Japan last year than you bought from Canada," he said. REUTER