Dairy cows graze in Saint-Pie, Que., in July, 2025. Dairy special interest groups and dairy farmers engaged in a letter-writing campaign to influence the federal government’s trade position ahead of USMCA negotiations.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Matt Malone is a scholar at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the author of Open Governments, Secret Canada: Hiding Information Other Countries Share.
Last year, when the federal government invited Canadians to share their views about the operation of USMCA, 5,143 stakeholders heeded the call.
In its summary of the findings, Ottawa noted that a cross-section of Canadian society – businesses, industry associations, unions, individuals, civil society and Indigenous groups – “voiced strong support for maintaining Canada’s supply‑management system for dairy, poultry, and eggs as a pillar of food sovereignty.”
But the actual submissions told a very different story – about a lopsided effort to influence policy.
Approximately 90 per cent of all submissions (4,572 out of 5,143) came from dairy special interest groups or dairy farmers engaged in a letter-writing campaign to influence the federal government’s trade position. I only learned that by filing a request under the Access to Information Act.
All the public got was an opaque summary of the consultations, leaving it unclear where any specific input came from. As with so much of the Carney government’s approach to trade with the United States, the attitude was tight-lipped and need-to-know.
That approach conflates two very different things: on the one hand, the necessary secrecy our trade negotiators require to conduct effective negotiations with a belligerent Trump administration and, on the other, the unnecessary secrecy that special interest groups seeking to influence our negotiators do not deserve.
This is a policy design problem. Special interests seeking to exert influence on trade negotiators must be subject to transparency by default. Those lobbying the government to take certain trade positions should do so in the open. Instead, the government has too often facilitated access in secret.
Canadians should not become inured to this style of governance. We saw it in the development of a federal AI strategy, too. There, the federal government decided not to publish the submissions it received about if or how to govern AI; instead, the feds simply used AI to summarize those consultations.
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In similar fashion, the “What We Heard” report for the USMCA consultations only summarized stakeholders’ views.
The dairy special interest groups and individuals’ letter I obtained advocated: “It is crucial that no new dairy concessions are granted in upcoming negotiations.”
This may or may not be a worthwhile position for our trade negotiators to stake out during negotiations with the United States and Mexico. But Canadians deserve to know what special interests are seeking to influence our negotiators – and on what topics.
Doing so helps correct the inevitable limits of representative government and ensure that any eventual trade agreement with the Americans reflects, as best as possible, public rather than private interests.
While many Canadians are willing to grant significant manoeuvring room to the Prime Minister and his delegates to deal with the erratic Trump administration, they also understand that secrecy is how governments hide corruption, maladministration and anything else they do not want to share with taxpayers.
That tension was on display in the deal signed between Canada and the United States that opened the Gordie Howe International Bridge, too, where the initially secret contents of that agreement were the subject of messaging by the Prime Minister that was later directly contradicted by objective reporting.
While some might caution against allowing too much transparency during negotiations, since it risks opening our negotiating hand to the Americans, the strategy of our negotiators and the demands of special interests are two very different things. The U.S. itself makes consultees’ inputs on USMCA public anyway.
Ottawa abusing access to information law to avoid releasing documents, watchdog says
As well, Canada’s entire access to information system – where reams of sensitive documents, including Cabinet confidences, are uploaded in the original before being redacted – uses American software, Granicus’s AMANDA solution. During the last federal election, Carney committed to an “objective” review of the system; but so far, he has not followed through on that promise.
The result of this secrecy is that average Canadians are being left in the dark. If Canada is going to get the best deal it can, we must simultaneously provide our trade negotiators with the latitude to deliberate in confidence while constraining the special interests that are trying to influence the terms of their work. Left with little sense of what special interests are advocating the government, the public has no opportunity to constrain undesirable moves.