Canada and Mexico in the Face of Trump

Canadians and Mexicans must move toward a position that will lead them to negotiate together with the United States. That would be the logical thing to do and is probably their best option in the face of the impending Donald Trump administration.

The notion is rational, practical, and has been useful for the past 25 years. But it is possible that this time it will not come to fruition. For the time being, Rafael Bernal recently wrote in The Hill, a Washington-based political newspaper geared toward the U.S. Congress, “[B]oth Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum are shadowboxing, pulling back from direct conflict between the two $2 trillion economies inextricably linked to — and forced to negotiate with — the $30 trillion behemoth.”

The point is correct. Sheinbaum and Trudeau appear to be competing separately for Trump’s attention, in what would be yet another display of the divide-and-conquer negotiating style employed by the U.S. president-elect ahead of the upcoming revision of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Not that it needs much. The opposition Canadian Conservative Party literally bristled when Trump equated Canada and Mexico by announcing his intention to impose 25% tariffs on their exports to the United States unless both reduced the influx of immigrants and illegal drugs.

The temptation of “my country first” is present in both nations, although Canadian sentiments have been more obvious, especially in the public opinions of conservative politicians who are awaiting the collapse of Trudeau’s weakened Liberal government.

Conservatives blame Trudeau for “poisoning” relations with the incoming Trump administration and thereby undermining the “special relationship” between Canada and the United States. But the so-called special relationship is part of the Canadian national myth, and it seems more present on their side than on the American one. The truth is that Canada and Mexico separately have a better negotiating capacity vis-à-vis their powerful neighbor, and although together they would also be greatly outmatched, they would certainly have a better chance of success than one-on-one, and even worse, in open competition to prove that one is more important than the other.

Trump’s taunts in referring to Trudeau as “governor” of the “state of Canada” are part of the negotiating tactics of the incoming U.S. president, as a follow-up to his claim that his country “subsidizes” the northern nation, which has served the rhetoric of the Conservative Party, the likely winner of the next parliamentary elections. To complicate matters further, there is confusion as to what will happen in 2026 when the three countries embark on the process of reviewing the USMCA, which many now fear will turn into a renegotiation of two bilateral agreements in a trilateral framework.