TORONTO (AP) — Canada’s minister for U.S. trade said Thursday the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement could be subject to annual review and that uncertainty could be the objective of the Trump administration.
Dominic LeBlanc told a business audience in Toronto that he will meet with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer late next week in Washington ahead of the mandatory review of the USMCA in July.
“If there’s no consensus in the review the agreement continues. Then there’s an annual review that starts and if uncertainty is one of the objectives from one of our (USMCA) partners you can imagine scenarios of how this might go,” LeBlanc said.
LeBlanc said the current uncertainty about the future of the free trade deal is causing a break in investment decisions in Canada.
“Net business investment is down,” LeBlanc said. “Therein lies one of the big challenges. We have to control what we can control.”
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has set a goal for Canada to double its non-U.S. exports in the next decade, saying American tariffs are causing a chill in investment. Carney recently made a trade deal with China and is in India this week.
U.S. President Donald Trump negotiated the USMCA in his first term and included a clause to review the deal in 2026.
Trump has talked about getting the U.S. automakers to close factories in Canada and move them to the U.S. and Greer has talked about “reshoring” industrial production.
LeBlanc said he’s “not pessimistic” about the future of the trade deal because the U.S. maintained an exemption for Canada and Mexico under the deal when Trump announced new tariffs recently.
“So, they’re doing that because it’s in the American economic interest to do that,” he said.
Most of Canada’s exports to the U.S. are currently exempted by USMCA. But tariffs are taking a toll on certain sectors of Canada’s economy, particularly aluminum, steel, auto and lumber.
LeBlanc said he felt Canada was close to getting a deal on sectoral tariffs in the fall, before Trump abruptly ended talks in response to an antitariff TV ad produced by the Ontario government.
LeBlanc said Trump administration officials have been engaged in a “political argument” about trade in public but insisted that’s not the case behind closed doors.
“There is a public prosecution of the argument, the political argument in the United States, and there are the private government-to-government-to-government conversations, which are not discouraging,” LeBlanc said.