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As Canadian officials put a full-court press on in Mexico this week, the Americans were talking openly about scrapping the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement for bilateral deals.
One deal with Mexico, where talks with the Americans are already underway, and one deal with Canada, perhaps, if we get around to it.
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Whether it’s his true view or a negotiating tactic, U.S. President Donald Trump has made a habit of saying he doesn’t need to renew CUSMA and could walk away from it.
“There’s no real advantage to it — it’s irrelevant to me. Canada would love it. Canada wants it. They need it,” Trump said last month during a tour of a Ford plant in Michigan.
In a story on the very real and growing possibility that Trump could scrap CUSMA for separate deals with Mexico and Canada, his top trade representative said don’t be surprised if it happens. During an interview with the New York Times , Jamieson Greer, Trump’s U.S. trade representative and chief negotiator, said there is no “natural reason” for CUSMA to be one deal instead of breaking it up.
“The president’s been quite clear,” Greer told the Times . “He’s half inclined to leave. So we’ll see how that goes.”
For reasons that aren’t quite clear, the Mark Carney government is intent on keeping CUSMA as a trilateral deal, even though Canada does comparatively little trade with Mexico. Currently, Canada takes in more than three times the value of goods from Mexico than we export to them.
Canada’s exports to Mexico in 2024 amounted to $6.1 billion compared to $34.5 billion worth of imports. We import almost six times more from Mexico than we export to them and our annual exports to Mexico equal about five days of exports to the United States.
Still, our charm offensive in Mexico this week was bigger than anything we’ve seen in Washington over the last year. A group of 370 government officials, business leaders and lobbyists went to Mexico for a six-day mission to push for more trade and make the case for a renewed trilateral CUSMA.
“I am reassured by the Mexican economy secretary … his desire to work with Canada and to ensure that the review of CUSMA results in a strengthened and ongoing trilateral trade arrangement,” Dominic LeBlanc, Carney’s point man on trade, said at a news conference.
“The Mexicans have very similar interests to Canada.
“We both remain absolutely committed to the trilateral free-trade agreement and working together as this review process unfolds.”
That’s an interesting take considering that Mexico has been negotiating their part of the deal with the Americans since January and at the beginning of this month signed an agreement with the U.S. on critical minerals . Given Canada’s critical minerals supply, this is the type of deal Canada could have sought, but domestic politics mean it’s better for the Liberals to be fighting with Trump than trying to win him over.
Despite the U.S. export market being worth 68 times the American market, there hasn’t been a trade mission to Washington that comes close to matching the size and scale of what we saw in Mexico this week.
Perhaps that’s due to polling and Carney putting the Liberal party above Canada’s economic interests.
Carney is leaning into findings like the Politico poll that found 58% of Canadians view the U.S. as an unreliable ally . That same poll showed that Canadians viewed the U.S. as a greater threat to world peace than China or even Russia, despite Russia being involved in an ongoing war with Ukraine.
Abacus Data has found that only about half of Canadians think it would be a bad thing if CUSMA came to an end . Financially and economically, ending CUSMA would cause tremendous damage, but politically it could be popular.
And so while Trump muses about ending CUSMA, Carney and the Liberals in Ottawa are moving in that direction with the nodding approval of a great many Canadians driven by emotion rather than logic.