The political and economic volatility in the United States has led many Canadians to wonder if it’s time to diversify our trading partners. It’s a fair question—and one we should have been asking long before the tariffs were even a possibility. Yes, the United States is our closest ally and our largest trading partner, but it’s time we grew out of our dependence. Not out of bitterness or ideology, but out of long-term strategic sense.

We don’t need to ditch the Americans—nor can we. The U.S. is the world’s largest market, and it’s right next door. We share a common language, similar regulatory environments and decades of integrated supply chains. But overreliance on the States is dangerous. Roughly 75 per cent of Canada’s goods exports go south of the border, while the U.S. sends only about 15 per cent of its exports to us. We need the Americans a whole lot more than they need us, and they know it.

Diversification would give us more leverage and stability in the long term. But there’s lots to do before we get there. Over the first decade of the 2000s, when I served in the Harper government, the prime minister recognized our overreliance on the U.S. and sought new footholds. His team began to pursue trade deals beyond North America, signing early agreements with South Korea, the European Union and countries across the Indo-Pacific. But........

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