Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum speaks during her daily press conference at Palacio Nacional in Mexico City on Sept. 4.YURI CORTEZ/AFP/Getty Images
Nine days after Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum was fielding a question about Canada.
What about this Canadian minister – it was then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland – suggesting that Mexico might have to be cut out of the USMCA trade deal?
That had ruffled Mexican feathers. Two weeks later, Ms. Sheinbaum faced another question about a faithless Canadian politician. This time a reporter asked about Doug Ford, “a premier, as they call them,” from Ontario, Canada, “who literally said that being compared with Mexico is the most insulting thing he’s heard” from the United States.
Mr. Ford’s comments were taken by Mexico’s elite as pretty insulting, too. The quick call to cut Mexico loose, so soon after Mr. Trump’s second election, turned out to be woefully misguided.
It’s Prime Minister Mark Carney’s job to get past that on his first official visit to Mexico this week.
Carney heads to Mexico to repair strained ties, boost trade
If there’s any country that shares the challenge of coping with a disruption of its heavy dependence on U.S. trade, it’s Mexico.
Neither can take the place of the U.S. for the other, and part of Mr. Carney’s visit to Mexico will be comparing notes on dealing with the U.S. But for the first time since the North American Free Trade Agreement was ratified in 1993, there’s a real impetus for the two countries to encourage bilateral Canada-Mexico trade. For decades, they have had a hard time looking past the U.S. to each other.
Ms. Sheinbaum, who focuses far more on domestic affairs than international relations, accepted Mr. Carney’s invitation to the G7 summit in Kananaskis, Alta., in June, and left more keen on the notion of stepping up ties with Canada. But Mr. Carney might still find Mexico’s leaders need some convincing.
Last November, when Ms. Sheinbaum was being peppered with questions about fair-weather friends in Canada, she stayed pretty calm.
She noted that there was a point in the 2018 trade talks that led to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement when the first Trump administration wanted to leave Canada out – and said Mexico insisted it was a trilateral trade agreement. She didn’t get into trading barbs with Mr. Ford. But people in her country had noticed that some Canadian politicians were quick to suggest abandoning Mexico.
That reaction was a mistake that should serve as a lesson for Canada.
Opinion: The USMCA agreement may be circling the drain. Time to fill the trade sink elsewhere
There was panic among this country’s political elite when Mr. Trump was elected last November and then threatened stiff tariffs on Canada (and Mexico).
The approach that Ms. Freeland and Mr. Ford suggested was getting closer to the U.S. by dumping Mexico from the relationship.
Ms. Freeland argued that Mr. Trump was really out to hit China, and Canada was “aligned” with the U.S. on China while Mexico was not. Canada had slapped steep tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, while Chinese EV-makers were looking at opening plants in Mexico.
Mr. Ford insisted that Mr. Trump’s threat to impose fentanyl tariffs was aimed at Mexico because Canada wasn’t nearly as bad a source of the drug – but Ottawa should beef up its fentanyl enforcement and border co-operation with the U.S. anyway.
It turned out that Mr. Trump didn’t much care about that. He cared about tariffs. He wanted a tariff wall around the U.S. market, particularly in some sectors, such as autos and steel. It wasn’t about alignment with China. It wasn’t really about fentanyl. Tariffs were coming, one way or another.
For decades, responding to uncertainty in relations with the U.S. by pulling closer – through free trade, border-security agreements, and so on – was Canada’s standard operating procedure.
But that model is broken. It brought benefits but also dependence, and Mr. Trump has shown Canada the dangers of dependence. If Mr. Trump lifted his tariffs tomorrow, that vulnerability would remain.
Still, it is not easy to steer trade elsewhere. The attractions of the U.S. market are real. Businesses in both Canada and Mexico got used to selling to U.S. customers. Mexican products that end up in Canada often get here via U.S. distributors.
Now tariffs have provided some impetus for direct trade. Mr. Carney has a chance to look for some of the long-lost potential for Canadian-Mexican business. He’ll have to convince Mexicans that the signals Canada sent last November are a thing of the past.