Canadians and Americans have a mutual interest in fighting Donald Trump’s trade war, writes Colin Robertson/Shutterstock

By Colin Robertson

March 16, 2025

With the major preoccupation of Canada’s new Carney government being Donald Trump’s trade war, one immediate priority should be to complement our current ‘top-level’ advocacy with a ‘bottom-up’ approach that enlists Americans in this fight.

In 2017, when Trump became president as our 25-year NAFTA renegotiation loomed, the Trudeau government adopted a diffused, Team Canada approach that involved an all-hands-on-deck diplomatic blitz of Congress, state houses and U.S. business contacts that had benefited from NAFTA. This time, Trump has launched a trade war that poses the same economic danger to citizens of both countries. It’s time to add a Team America component to Team Canada.

In practise, this means mobilizing Canadians to call their American customers, clients, and friends and remind them that the tariffs are hurting our mutual livelihoods, and that the disruption is going to make us all poorer.

Canada’s top-down efforts must include more bottom-up advocacy to reach Americans feeling the direct impact of the tariffs and encourage them to reach out to their elected representatives — county, state and national — telling them the tariffs are costing them and must be removed.

As a Canadian diplomat in the U.S., I used to tell visiting ministers that on almost any bilateral issue, except perhaps Olympic and Four Nations’ hockey finals, there are always more Americans who think like Canadians than there are actual Canadians. That hasn’t changed.

Success this time will depend on Canadian business — small, medium, and big — and Canadian labour, especially those who are affiliated with American counterparts, like the Steelworkers, Teamsters and Seafarers, actively reaching out with their ask, and in doing so posing some simple questions:

• Do Americans want to pay more for their gas and groceries because of tariffs?
• Do American farmers want to pay more for potash while losing Canada as a major market for their farm products?
• Do we really want to wreck our joint auto industry in a tsunami of tariffs every time a part crosses the border?

Success will depend equally on our provincial and local legislators. The premiers’ involvement is critical. Many of them, notably Premier Doug Ford as chair of the Council of the Federation, are doing excellent work in their own outreach to their state-governor counterparts.

So, too, must provincial legislators, mayors, and councillors. They are closer to the realities of trade in their constituencies, and we look to them to push local business and local labour to get involved and make the calls.

Galvanizing our business associations and unions to help keep track of the contacts makes sense. Cross-border associations like the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region (PNWER), the Canadian American Business Council (CABC), and the NASCO Network continental trade group will be helpful. The Canadian Embassy’s state fact sheets are a useful source and we should reactivate the interactive mapping project of the Business Council of Canada.

We should also enlist our one million “snowbirds” who flock south, mostly to red states like Florida and Arizona. Now required to register and carry their I-94 form on them at all times (why not just brand us with a maple leaf?), they need to tell their neighbours and those they buy services from that this is going to hurt them. If wintering in the U.S. becomes unpleasant, they can go to Mexico, with whom we need to make common cause.

For this campaign, we need thousands and thousands of individual voices making the case for lifting the tariffs. They need to contact their elected representatives, speak out at congressional town halls and talk with their neighbours. We need them to argue for growing the pie by taking advantage of what we already do well and making it more resilient. By making things together, we have created mutual prosperity and security.

Our current ‘top-down’ approach, which worked well in the past, was premised in the belief that our best and easiest entrée into the complex and cacophonous American political and policy system — a multi-ring circus of competing and conflicting interests — was through the administration and especially the president.  Since Franklin Roosevelt, presidents whether Democrat or Republican, understood the big picture and their attitude to Canada was mostly benign and, often, benevolent.

Both Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien understood the importance of establishing a close personal relationship with presidents. They used it to great effect. It requires skill and patience and what former US Ambassador Gordon Giffin called the ‘Goldilocks’ formula: don’t get too distant but don’t get too close.

Mulroney’s friendships with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush secured the Canada-US FTA and the Montreal Protocol, the Acid Rain Accord and the NAFTA. Chrétien’s relationship with Bill Clinton, while less overt, was equally strong and Clinton’s defence of federalism at Mont Tremblant in 1999helped put the separatist genie back in the bottle. In the wake of 9-11, the Smart Border Declaration reflected the clever delegation by Chrétien and George W. Bush to Foreign Minister John Manley and Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge.

Now we have Donald Trump, a political predator and economic belligerent, who ignores facts and seems convinced that applying tariffs to Canada will not only help him attract investment into the US and provide him with revenue for his tax cuts but strangle Canada economically and so result in our eventual annexation as the 51st state. Prime Minister Mark Carney got it right when he called this “crazy” and said it is “never going to happen”.

As prime minister, Justin Trudeau made yeoman efforts to cultivate a relationship with Mr. Trump. While critics point to Trump’s characterization of Trudeau as ‘very dishonest & weak’in a tweet after the 2018 Charlevoix G7 summit, they forget that in 2020 they signed the new NAFTA, known as the CUSMA in Canada. Chrystia Freeland, whom Trump called a ‘nasty woman’ successfully quarterbacked the negotiations. At the time, Trump proclaimed it the “best deal’ ever.

Despite Trump’s ongoing provocations, Trudeau kept his eye on the ball. This time, however, despite best efforts, including dinner at Mar-a-Lago, it didn’t work. Instead, we, and the rest of our fellow allies, are enduring Trump at his most pathological, flooding the zone with his pronouncements, seemingly intent on destroying democracy at home and abroad as he aligns himself with the autocrats.

Carney’s credentials, working for Goldman Sachs for 13 years in New York, as the central banker of two G7 countries and chairing, for two terms, the international Financial Stability Board, are such that Trump will find it hard to demean him, although he will surely try.

Trump understands precisely where those roles situated Carney in the Wall Street hierarchy. Carney speaks the language of economics legitimately and fluently compared to Trump’s incoherent Esperanto. Their talks about tariffs and trade will be defined by that dynamic, whoever else is in the room.

As a Canadian diplomat in the U.S., I used to tell visiting ministers that on almost any bilateral issue, except perhaps Olympic and Four Nations’ hockey finals, there are always more Americans who think like Canadians than there are actual Canadians.

Ours is more than a trade war. It’s an economic war designed to restore American primacy as the AI-enabled manufacturing hub with Canada as the source of resources, including water.

Whether we will have any meaningful dialogue will depend on assembling a coalition of the afflicted – the G6, NATO and other partners with an agenda that will include currencies, foreign direct investment, defence production and procurement, industrial policies and resilient supply chains for trade. This is Carney’s wheelhouse and a niche where Canada can play the role of helpful fixer.

Meanwhile, the guardrails, checks and balances of American democracy are under strain as never before. The Republican party controls the legislative branch, with slim majorities in both the House and Senate, but for now it is in thrall to Trump. We look to the third branch of government, the judiciary, to uphold the rule of law on, for example, the legitimacy of using the demonstrably false claims against Canada as a source of fentanyl and migrants to justify “national security” tariffs.

As much as Trump claims to love tariffs, we also thought that he cared about markets. But as they plummet to new lows because of his capriciousness, his spokespersons say the stock market is just a “snapshot”. Maybe.

We do know Trump follows the polls and watches the media, occasionally even the detested “mainstream media”. And in less than two years, the public will deliver its verdict on his administration in the midterm elections. So, he has to listen to voters. It was this reality that persuaded him not to scrap the NAFTA after his first 100 days in office in 2017.

But I would also remind Canadians not to kid themselves. Ours is an asymmetrical relationship. We need the USA more than it needs Canada. They take ¾ of our exports and generate about a third of our economy while we account for about 1/6 of their exports and about two percent of their economy. We level the playing field through trade agreements with dispute settlement. But it depends on trust and fair play. For now, neither condition applies.

So, we must look to ourselves, complete the elimination of internal trade barriers and diversify our current trade relationships. John Weekes, our chief negotiator in the original NAFTA and my colleague in the Canada-US Experts Group, provides excellent advice in his recent Policy piece From Phoney War to Trade War: Canada’s Next Steps.

But we can’t change our geography and, until now, we would not have wanted to. For over a century, our partnership and binational alliance has sustained our economy, shielded our security and provided joint stewardship of our environment.

Our primary goal, therefore, must remain that of keeping our security and preferred access to the US, still the biggest market in the world.

Traditional diplomacy does not apply in the U.S., so our ambassador and consuls general must have political ‘nous’, communications and advocacy skills. Government by civil servants works for Canada and our penchant for ‘peace, order and good government’ but in the land of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, it is brass-knuckle politics and to succeed we need to play by their rules.

Going forward, we should increase our diplomatic representation in the U.S. We must have more eyes, ears and voices on the ground. At a minimum, this means opening new consulates in the eight or ten battleground states that decide the presidency.

We should also have business and political savvy honorary consuls in the states where we are not represented. Creating state business councils like the Canada-Arizona Business Council should be another deliverable.

The tariffs have unified Canadians as never before. Our vociferous response to Trump’s delusion has given Canada more US media coverage than ever. Given our declining dollar, it’s an opportunity to launch a ‘Visit Canada’ tourism blitz. We need to emphasize, as political leaders have done, that our quarrel is not with the American people with whom we are friends, allies and neighbours but with Donald Trump whose behaviour is downright un-American. He is as much a threat to them as it is to us.

For now, our situation is a bilateral crisis, all the more egregious for being a manufactured one. But we need to persevere, keeping in mind that our efforts will be measured not by a sweeping skate down the ice but by that metaphor from football, Americans’ favourite sport: in ‘three yards and a cloud of dust’.

Contributing Writer Colin Robertson, a former career diplomat, is a fellow and host of the Global Exchange podcast with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute in Ottawa.