When Ottawa broke off negotiations with the United States last month, it said any trade deal with President Donald Trump would be written “in pencil.”
The Trump administration has countered that it has successfully negotiated trade deals with many other countries.
“Which deal is that that we haven’t respected, that we’ve signed over the past year?” U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in an Aug. 26 interview with CBC’s Rosemary Barton.
“I’m just not familiar with that. I mean, we have made a dozen deals.”
But experts say the Trump administration’s trade deals with other countries are a poor guide for Canada.
“The reality is that Canada is in a very different situation,” said Alexander Hobbs, an Ottawa-based international trade lawyer at Cassidy Levy Kent.
“ Mark Carney’s government — the decisions they make are going to be heavily, heavily informed by the fact that the two economies are so closely linked,” said Hobbs.
‘Very one-sided’
The United States has just 14 comprehensive free trade agreements (FTAs) with a mere 20 countries.
The Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement is one of those FTAs. It and its predecessor agreement NAFTA helped transform Mexico and Canada into the United States’ top two trade partners.
By contrast, the United States does not have comprehensive free trade agreements with any of its other major trading partners, including the European Union, China, Taiwan, Japan or the United Kingdom.
The only other top-10 trading partner with which the United States does have a comprehensive FTA is South Korea, and unlike CUSMA, that agreement does not expire.
In the president’s second term, the Trump administration has secured trade deals with many of the U.S.’s major trade partners, as well as about a dozen smaller economies.
But Kathleen Claussen, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., says these trade deals are unusual in many respects.
For one, they are often not binding.
“In these agreements we’ve seen in the last 18 months, they have very few commitments that use the word ‘shall’, which is normally the key indicator that there’s a binding commitment,” Claussen said.
“They’re very aspirational.”
Adams Lee, a Seattle-based international trade lawyer at Harris Sliwoski, agrees.
“I kinda doubt that there is gonna be any consequence if [countries] don’t live up to them,” he said.
“If you look at the U.S.-China agreement that was negotiated at the end of [Trump’s] first term to settle the China tariff disputes … China committed to buy a lot of U.S. goods. … But China didn’t come close to buying as much as they promised, and the U.S. didn’t really do anything as a result of that.
“They still haven’t.”
The deals are also “very one-sided,” Claussen says.
For example, under the EU-U.S. trade deal reached last July, the United States agreed to cap most tariffs on EU goods at 15 per cent.
The bloc, by contrast, agreed to remove its tariffs on all American industrial goods, lower tariffs on some “non-sensitive” U.S. agricultural products, and have European companies invest $600 billion in the United States.
In Claussen’s view, countries’ willingness to make such concessions has surprised even some Americans.
“I think the U.K., the EU and other countries … have come forward with remarkable concessions, or at least expressing that they’re willing to do a lot for the administration, for the United States. … So much so that it surprised a lot of D.C. policymakers,” she said.
Another unusual aspect of the trade deals is they have been negotiated by the president under the threat of tariffs.
Trade agreements and tariffs are normally the purview of Congress. While Congress has delegated tariff authority to the president under some laws, these powers are subject to limits.
Trump initially imposed broad tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, but the U.S. Supreme Court struck these down in February.
The Trump administration has also imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum on national security grounds. And it has turned to 1930s-era trade laws for other tariffs, such as the 50-per-cent tariffs it imposed on select Canadian goods in August.
Lee questions whether those laws authorize such sweeping presidential action.
“They weren’t intended to give the president a blank slate to do whatever he wanted,” he said.
Avoiding the spotlight
Countries’ goals in agreeing to these trade deals has been to maintain relations with the United States — and avoid more punitive outcomes.
In a July statement, the European Commission said its trade deal had delivered on the the bloc’s “key objectives”:
“Protecting EU trade and investment from an escalating, unpredictable transatlantic trade conflict; safeguarding the Union’s core economic interests; [and] strengthening EU unity,” the statement said.
Japan articulated similar reasons after agreeing to its trade deal with the United States in July, 2025.
“Close Japan-U.S. bilateral relations are indispensable for the stability and prosperity of not only our two nations but also the entire Indo-Pacific region and the international community as a whole,” then prime minister Shigeru Ishiba said in a statement.
Claussen says countries are aiming to secure a “détente” or to get out of Trump’s crosshairs.
The United Kingdom, for example, saw an advantage in securing a deal early “to be out of the spotlight,” she said.
“You’re no longer in the president’s sights as a place that needs a higher rate or that needs to be gone after for one thing or another.”
These countries agree to the best terms they can in the circumstances.
“You hope that you can secure a promise that will lower some rate for some period of time for some of your entities that are important to you,” Claussen said.
Lee says countries focused on getting to a deal have set the “low bar” of avoiding worse outcomes than other countries.
“EU, UK, Japan reached ‘deals’ with the US that avoided other tariffs placed on most other countries by the US,” he wrote in an email before his interview with Canadian Affairs. “This provides a relative tariff advantage over other countries.”
Lee notes that Mexico has gone to greater lengths than Canada to be “low-key, not antagonistic.”
“Mexico’s President Sheinbaum … tends to give Trump something at critical moments,” he said.
“So Mexico somehow has managed to stay relatively under the radar. You don’t see [Trump] spouting off so much about Mexico.”
‘Closest neighbours’
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said last week that trade talks with the United States are “advancing” and the parties “hope to reach an agreement.”
Critics of Canada’s trade strategy have said Canada should be taking a similarly conciliatory approach and trying to reach a deal.
“Sheinbaum has gotten it right: not taking the bait,” Ricardo Monreal, a Mexican lawmaker who leads Sheinbaum’s coalition in Congress, told the New York Times.
“Mexico is not positioned for a major confrontation, and I think the president understands that very well, unlike Canada,” Monreal added.
Mark Warner, a Toronto-based trade lawyer, has said he does not understand Carney’s trade strategy.
“ For some reason, Canadian politicians don’t want do what every other country wants to do,” Warner said in a Sept. 8 interview with the CBC’s David Common. “Yeah, there will be people in Europe cheering us on, but they’re not doing what Mr. Carney is doing.”
Warner was not available for an interview with Canadian Affairs before press time.
But others say Canada’s deep integration with the United States necessarily changes how the parties can approach trade talks.
“[F]or other countries that might be conceding to tariffs … it might be easier for them to integrate with neighbouring economies,” said Hobbs, the Ottawa trade lawyer.
“Whereas [for] Canada, our direct neighbour, our closest neighbour, is the United States … so it’s just a totally different situation.”
This difference means Canada and the United States are both seriously negotiating “for a deal that makes sense to both economies,” Hobbs said.
In his view, Washington’s continued participation in CUSMA is evidence the Trump administration does want a revised agreement.
“If they weren’t serious, they could just give six months’ notice and tear up the deal,” he said, referring to CUSMA’s withdrawal terms.
Kelly Ann Shaw, a Washington-based trade lawyer and former Trump trade official, notes that the latest Canada-U.S. confrontation is limited in scope, despite how it might appear.
“I would classify this as more of a trade row than a full-blown trade war,” she said in a Sept. 8 CNBC interview.
“Even with the U.S. retaliatory tariffs from a few weeks ago, and Canada’s tariffs that just went into effect … we’re still talking about less than five per cent of U.S.-Canada trade being impacted by any of this.
“This is a very small percentage of trade,” she said. “There’s still an off ramp here.”
