One year into the trade war, Canadians are feeling more patriotic and more convinced the United States is a worse place under Donald Trump. And as the president dangles the fate of North American free trade above a wood chipper, a split has emerged between business leaders worried about bottom lines and Canadians who are simply over the president’s provocations.
“The key thing that has struck me, and I think it has struck all Canadians, is so many of these guys in the Trump administration, frankly, they just hate Canada,” said Brian Clow, former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s deputy chief of staff who led Canada-U.S. affairs.
Clow’s read is that the review is starting under a darker cloud than Trump’s first-term talks because there are “very senior and significant MAGA influencers” inside the president’s orbit “who really don’t like Canada” that Ottawa can’t do anything about.
Clow, who was involved with tense trade talks that led to the United States-Canada-Mexico Agreement during Trump’s first term, has been struck by the “aggressiveness and almost anger” levied against Canada by Trump and his inner circle that didn’t exist before.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick lived up to his abrasive reputation when he told a Toronto business conference behind closed doors that America is taking back car assembly and Canada can’t stop it from happening. Then MAGA influencer Katie Miller’s claim that “the U.S. doesn’t need anything from Canada” came out of left field — notable because of her husband Stephen Miller’s job as White House deputy chief of staff.
No one was threatening Canada’s sovereignty during Trump’s first term, Clow said. “Nobody was posting memes with an American flag over Canadian territory.”
Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, Trump’s envoy in Ottawa who makes headlines in Canada for his outspoken, confrontational diplomatic style, declined to comment on Clow’s remarks.
“That’s not because of anything Canada should or could do,” he said. “The administration is so dug in on their policies, they’re going to want and demand a bunch of unilateral concessions from Canada, and the asks may just be too significant for Canada to agree to.”
Summer deadline for vow renewal
A $1 trillion trade relationship is on the line as Canada and countless industry groups race to preserve a free trade deal that allows more than 85 percent of goods and services to flow tariff free between the U.S. and Canada.
Canada, the U.S. and Mexico have until July 1 to signal whether they support renewal of the trilateral pact — or else face the unpredictability of annual reviews until the deal expires in 2036.
It’s “not a secret” the president is musing about ripping up the deal, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told Bloomberg last month, employing a Trump negotiating tactic to repeatedly threaten to kill a group project unless he gets his way.
“Maybe we’ll have separate protocols with Canada and Mexico that we tack on to USMCA,” Greer floated. “We just have to fix some of the gaps.”
Greer and Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc were to meet Friday to officially launch bilateral review talks. LeBlanc told a Toronto business audience last week that he’s confident the trilateral trade pact will renew because it legally doesn’t expire until 2036.
What’s uncertain, he said, is how long the actual review will take.
“It could be a half an hour meeting with Jamieson Greer and [Mexican Economy] Secretary [Marcelo] Ebrard and I,” LeBlanc joked. “Everything’s good. Nothing to see here. Let’s keep going — could be that.”
Realistically, it won’t be that.
Prime Minister Mark Carney told a Sydney think tank audience this week that Trump “is more interested in your viewpoint on various things” which creates a space to work through issues — but the two leaders’ direct messages aren’t the space where USMCA irritants will be hashed out.
Carney has switched up the Team Canada lineup — replacing trade policy expert Kirsten Hillman with his friend Mark Wiseman. Carney’s new man in Washington is a former BlackRock executive who will work with LeBlanc and new chief trade negotiator Janice Charette, a veteran public servant with deep expertise in granular government details, to convince the Trump administration to lower its tariffs on key Canadian industries.
The work begins as prominent Canadian voices, such as former Deputy Prime Minister John Manley, diverge from the business consensus that the trilateral pact is integral for economic prosperity. Canada was fine before it, Manley told the nation’s public broadcaster last month: “We don’t need it. We can move on without it.”
The split in business opinion is unique to Canada, said Louise Blais, senior special adviser at the Business Council of Canada.
“You’re not hearing those voices in the United States, and you’re not hearing them in Mexico,” said Blais, a former Canadian diplomat based in Atlanta and the United Nations in New York City.
She warned that if “important voices” continue to work against USMCA renewal, it will be a challenge for Ottawa heading into review talks.
A former Canadian ambassador to the U.S. insists Manley’s view is not widely held. Frank McKenna, now deputy chair of TD Securities, says it’s a moot exercise to compare this year’s USMCA review to the original negotiations nine years ago because there was “no joy” to that process, either.
“The only difference now is that the drama has become a daily occurrence, perhaps not weekly,” McKenna said. “The unpredictability is now a hallmark of the government, not an aberration.”
But if Manley’s comments do not reflect the mood of business leaders, they do capture the feelings of regular Canadians. An Abacus poll suggests more than half of Canadians agree that the end of the USMCA wouldn’t make much of a difference for Canada.
“While business leaders and policy insiders have been sounding alarms about the risks surrounding the CUSMA review, the broader public is far less on edge,” wrote pollster David Coletto.
America’s unreliability as a trade partner fuels global trade diversification ambitions — a tougher gambit for Canada because of geography and so much of its economy being intertwined with America.
“Trump has given us and the rest of the world a burning platform to pull away from the United States of America,” McKenna said. “And the United States is, instead of becoming an indispensable country, is going to become literally an international pariah.”
Balancing cross-border interests
Rather than wait for the American president and his Cabinet to change, Canadians have changed their habits, boycotting U.S. alcohol and travel — return trips to the U.S. dropped 25 percent since Trump’s return to the White House.
Julian Ovens, a partner at Crestview Strategy and former chief of staff to two Canadian international trade ministers, said as trade talks ramp up, there are lots of businesses — especially in the defense and aerospace industries — that want to continue to work and grow with the U.S.
Balancing cross-border interests while executing an election promise to Canadians to diversify away from America has become quite a trick for Team Carney.
“If you are an executive and you’ve got a big facility in the U.S. and you’re bidding on work down there, you don’t really want the Canadian government poking the American government too, too much in the eye,” Ovens said.
While Carney’s diversification push has sparked a new deal culture on Parliament Hill, there’s a limit to what the government can do — especially in a year where crises keep billowing.
“We have been reminded of that almost every day in 2026 starting with Venezuela,” Ovens said, adding that Trump’s rhetoric is only going to ramp up, forcing new C-suite conversations.
“Even if Donald Trump came out and said, ‘I’m sorry, and we can just keep it as it is’ — there is not a boardroom in this country for which the risk committee of their board would not have a conversation about diversifying supplier relationships and customer relationships.”
That’s something else for MAGA to talk about.
