Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says that if the next U.S. president re-opens trade negotiations for the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), Canada will prioritize its own interests.
“We’ve done this before; we can do it again if we need to,” Trudeau said at a news conference Friday. “We’ll do it by putting Canadian interests first and foremost, as we have every other time.”
The prime minister’s comments follow a vow Thursday by Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. president Donald Trump to reopen the free-trade agreement when it comes up for review in 2026, should he be elected this November.
“I will formally notify Mexico and Canada of my intention to invoke the six-year renegotiation provisions of the USMCA that I put in,” Trump told the Detroit Economic Club. “It’s coming due very soon. Oh, I’m going to have a lot of fun.”
Trump said he planned to seek stronger protections against transshipment, or indirect routing of goods through multiple ports, in order to prevent other economies including China from introducing products to the United States through Mexico.
“They smuggle this stuff in. They don’t pay anything. We’re going to have very strong language on that,” Trump said.
Instituted in 2020, USMCA was the tensely negotiated replacement to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed by Trump and Trudeau, as well as former Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto.
U.S. Vice-President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris wrote in a September post to X that she would also review USMCA as president, if elected.
Canada bucks isolationism: Trudeau
At the Friday news conference, Trudeau said that nations around the world were growing increasingly isolationist, but that Canada remains open to trade.
“We’ve been here before. We know that there is a certain amount of protectionist sentiment in the United States right now and indeed in the world,” he said. “Canada has successfully bucked that trend.”
The prime minister pointed to a number of trade relationships Canada has cultivated in recent years, including with the European Union and countries in the Indo-Pacific including Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia, among others.
Regarding potential future negotiations on USMCA, Trudeau said that Canada’s plan would be similar to those before.
“We did it by standing up for Canadian jobs, for demonstrating how integrated — in the case of the United States — our economies already are, and we are ready to do it again, if necessary,” he said.
“Canadians and Americans have always successfully worked together to create opportunities that far go beyond each of our individual countries.”
With files from CTV News’ Daniel Otis
