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Margareta Dovgal: How Canada can win by giving Trump what he wants

Conceding on supply management and streaming, while leveraging oil and gas is how to get through trade negotiations

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Predictably, the Americans have declined to renew the Canada U.S. Mexico Agreement. As of Wednesday’s deadline, the trade deal enters potentially a decade of annual reviews, staying in force and expiring in 2036. That precarious uncertainty weighs heavily on the Canadian economy. A review decade is also a decade-long negotiation: nothing prevents the two countries from striking a new deal earlier, or conversely scrapping it with six months’ notice. In bargaining, Canada should concede where our own policies make us poorer, and hold the line only where it makes us richer.

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U.S. trade representatives blamed the agreement’s “shortcomings and our trade deficits with these countries.” By their figures, the goods deficit with Canada ran $46 billion last year, against $197 billion with Mexico. U.S. President Donald Trump frames it less delicately. “We don’t need anything that Canada has,” he said last month. “They need everything that we have. And they have to treat us better.”

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