By Lawrence Herman

September 2, 2026

Amid unwarranted tariffs and the flood of disparaging insults directed at Canada by the Trump administration — led by the president himself — the Canada-U.S. bilateral relationship has descended into chaos.

Under these dismal circumstances, there’s no possibility of concluding any kind of normal trade agreement with the Trump administration. So why would Canada even want to get back to the negotiating table?

A “normal” trade agreement means one where there’s an agreed set of objectives and, in trade negotiation parlance, where there’s some likelihood of a balance of concessions that will produce a mutually satisfactory outcome.

While that definition does apply to the Canada-US-Mexico agreement that Trump himself signed and lauded as more than satisfactory in 2918, none of these conditions is present with the Trump II White House. The US side isn’t interested in any kind of balanced deal. Why should Canada even try to negotiate with them?

Some commentators hope that re-engaging with the U.S. will keep the CUSMA ticking over. But how much of it really works in practice? Is there any chance that the US will act in good faith to keep the trilateral CUSMA Free Trade Commission or the various sectoral working groups, task forces, committees and other mechanisms operating under the Agreement? Do we really think the dispute settlement system has any chance of working?

The rhetoric telegraphing Trump’s intention to mothball CUSMA goes back at least as far as the 2024 election campaign, escalating to warnings about a tariff war against Canada in November of that year, shortly after he won. The only question surrounding that rhetoric was whether it was genuine or tactical; was Trump using fear to leverage concessions or authentically targeting the trilateral trade deal for liquidation?

Only time would tell, and we now find ourselves at the moment of reckoning with the answer.

Per the recent evidence, in combination with violations of CUSMA by unwarranted duties on Canadian exports, there’s been a torrent of insults directed at Canada by Trump and his team. Without re-hashing the direct quotes with which we’re all familiar, Trump himself has repeatedly stated that the United States doesn’t need anything Canada has (the fact that CUSMA exists being exhibit A in the case against that assertion).

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, USTR Jamieson Greer and others in the administration have echoed these sentiments and joined in the propaganda trolling of America’s peaceful neighbour and most reliable ally.

At the very least, this administration has consistently displayed a shocking level of bad faith on this file, and good faith being indispensable to any negotiation, the problem that has created for Canada as an interlocutor was made abundantly clear by Mark Carney on August 21st and 22nd.

To add insult to intractability, Trump administration sources have said that by suspending negotiations, Canada walked away from a better deal than any other US trading partner had. These are ludicrous comments because all those deals are terrible, one-sided, non-binding arrangements totally slanted to US interests.

In other words, Canada walked away from getting the best of a collection of bad trade deals that were strong-armed by the Trump administration in 2025-2026 with the UK, Japan, the EU, plus a number of others, including some Latin American countries.

Let’s look at these various deals, described by the USTR as “historic frameworks”, not as binding treaties or agreements. None was approved by Congress and they don’t even qualify as Congressional Executive Agreements under the US system. They’re simply statements of intent — quite likely misdirectional ones at that, given Trump’s record of misrepresenting his intent — tariff-type arrangements concluded under various statutes that ostensibly delegate Trump this authority.

None of these deals restricts Trump’s unilateral right to change the deal by increasing tariff rates at any time as he chooses.

Based on the manner in which trade deals have functioned since trade deals were first struck in the 13th century and, more recently, per the Vienna Convention on Treaties of 1969 among other codifications of international law in general and trade law in particular, that unilateral violation option means these deals are essentially meaningless — the trade-deal equivalent of a certificate of ownership for swampland in Florida or the Brooklyn Bridge.

Rampant mercantilist policy backed by the cudgel of unilateral tariffs, accompanied by relentless ad hominem belligerence and bereft of any sense of mutual accommodation or common purpose. That’s what Mark Carney walked away from.

Take the 8 May 2025 US-UK Economic Prosperity Deal (EPD). Nothing commits the US to any firm obligation to respect tariff rates. To the contrary, the deal specifically reserves the right of the president to impose higher duties on self-determined national security grounds which, given the exotic interpretation of national security as it relates to trade by the Trump administration, amounts to an arbitrary abrogation clause.

While it says the U.S. will give the UK a break on auto tariffs, this is qualified under section 1, which says,

(c) The United States intends to provide certain key UK imports with modified reciprocal tariff treatment, based on our balanced trading relationship and shared national security priorities. Any such modifications will be consistent with those shared national security priorities, including priorities identified in future U.S. Section 232 investigations.

To show how fluid all this is, over the past year, the two countries have been continuing to negotiate reciprocal access for a range of items, almost an ongoing, perpetual set of talks. And, pursuant to the national security exemption above, the president changed the auto tariff regime in July 2026, using his authority under section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act.

The recent U.S. arrangements with Japan, the EU and others are of the same type — handshake undertakings recognizing Trump’s right to continue raising duties for what have proven to be subjective, arbitrary reasons.

For example, under the July 2025 Framework Agreement with Japan, in return for lower auto tariffs, Japan pledged to invest $550 billion in U.S. infrastructure, energy, semiconductors, and critical minerals. Section 6 of the agreement confirms that if Japan falls short of any of its targets, the president retains the option to raise tariffs as he sees fit.

By any standard, these are not balanced trade deals. They are a systematic assault on the integrity of the global trading order and its norms, conventions, treaties and longstanding economic anatomy.

It’s nothing less than rampant mercantilist policy backed by the cudgel of unilateral tariffs, accompanied by relentless ad hominem belligerence and bereft of any sense of mutual accommodation or common purpose. That’s what Mark Carney walked away from.

Why would Canada legitimize it by going back to the table?

While Trump took offense at Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s ad featuring clips of Ronald Reagan stating his opposition to tariff walls, it might have been just as powerful to quote from Reagan’s actual message to Congress in 1988, requesting its approval of the original Canada-US Free Trade Agreement:

With this Agreement, we are tearing down the tariff walls that block the flow of trade and generally eliminating the tangle of restrictions and regulations that inhibit our commerce and economic cooperation. As this Agreement takes effect, Americans and Canadians will be more able to conduct business, invest, and trade where they like. Two proud, independent, and sovereign nations – Canada and the United States — will pull together, as partners, toward a future of economic growth and prosperity.

Prime Minster Carney in his January 2026 Davos speech warned that nostalgia is ill-suited to today’s environment, saying that we need to take the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be.

Still, the perspective of history can provide invaluable context to our current choice architecture, especially when the present departs so radically from both established norms and reasonable bilateral behaviour by any standard, in any era.

Following Carney’s admonition, then, the cold, hard reality of Canada-U.S. relations shows that a proper, balanced trade agreement with the Trump administration is simply not in the cards.

Some kind of truce, with bilateral side deals in certain sectors like autos, steel, aluminum, etc., may be possible. Some observers say it’s in the interests of both sides to re-engage in some fashion, even if Canadian countermeasures kick in and the U.S. may retaliate further.

Given what this process has revealed so far about not just the intent but the motives of this administration, it is difficult to imagine the conditions whereby that would be either wise or politically viable. The Canadian auto sector alone might revolt.

This leaves Mark Carney with limited options for further engagement with this administration on this file, at least until conditions across the border change.

Does that make us an involuntary accessory to Donald Trump’s increasingly obvious aim to end CUSMA? Better an involuntary accessory than a consensual accomplice. We need to take the situation as it is.

Policy contributor Lawrence Herman is trade counsel with Herman & Associates, a senior fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto and a member of the Expert Group on Canada-U.S. Relations. He is a former foreign service officer, having served in Canada’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations and the GATT.