By Ray Rivers
December19th, 2025
BURLINGTON, ON
Donald Trump delivered an unprecedented 18 minute end-of-year progress report to the American people last Wednesday evening. The speech was hurried and replete with Trump’s trade mark superlatives. And most of what he said, as usual, was pure fantasy. Though Trump’s love of tariffs, his favourite word, is very real.
It was once an undefended open border.
Trade with Canada didn’t feature in the speech however, on that same day one of his trade minions announced America’s initial conditions for the renewal of the North American trade agreement, USMCA or CUSMA as we Canadians call it. USMCA runs to 2036 in principle but can be cancelled or amended anytime, and is subject to a review in 2026.
The Yanks would like us to fold up our supply management system for dairy and let them sell as much duty free milk and cheese here as they want. They are annoyed that most of the premiers have taken American booze off the shelves and want that reversed. They have also asked that the government rescind the digital services tax, which is still on the books, even though the tax is not being collected.
Mr. Carney says Trump has never told him he wanted to kill the trade pact. And he thought they were close to compromising on the US sectoral tariffs. That is, before Doug Ford ended negotiations with his hair-brained plan to run an old Ronald Reagan speech on US TV stations. Mr. Trump considered that to be foreign interference in US politics and cancelled all further sectoral trade discussions with Canada.
Trump, arguably, has already broken the deal by his unjustified tariffs. But he doesn’t care about that little detail, and nobody should think he’s giving up on eventually putting a tariff on every thing crossing the US border. He is convinced he’ll be able to raise enough money through tariffs to cut income taxes even more – and possibly meet his goal of eliminating income taxes all together. So odds are that any renewed USMCA, should there be one, will not be about ‘free’ trade.
One of the two isn’t getting what’s going on.
Mr. Carney claims that around 70% of Canada’s exports continue to enter the US duty free, despite the other US tariffs. So any new trade deal with tariffs will only provide less competitive access to US markets. So you’d think we should be in no rush to ink another trade agreement. And that may explain why Mr. Carney is not in any rush to renew USMCA.
USMCA and it’s earlier versions were conceived in the context of globalization. But now the world order has changed thanks to Putin, Xi and Trump. We now need to focus on ourselves, building Canada, and our physical and economic national security. And when it comes to trading with the bully next door, no deal is better than a bad deal. That is especially true if it means sacrificing our dairy farmers and decades-long economic stability for the farm communities reliant on them.
Ray Rivers, a Gazette Contributing Editor, writes regularly applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was once a candidate for provincial office in Burlington. He was the founder of the Burlington citizen committee on sustainability at a time when climate warming was a hotly debated subject. Ray has a post graduate degree in economics that he earned at the University of Ottawa. Tweet @rayzrivers
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I would rather see Canada sacrifice the Supply Management System and let the dairy and poultry industry compete as most other of our agricultural products do ,than sacrifice the auto industry.
Editor’s Note:
You might want to rethink that position.
Excellent deflection to cover Carney’s poor performance, Ray.
I guess you can tell the auto workers and steel workers that “no deal is better than a bad deal”, that should make their Christmas, complements of “Who Cares Carney”.
Carney was elected on the basis of “a win against Trump”, now 8 months in “no win”, no deal, no results, he’s now asking for the equivalent of a “participation trophy” in kid’s sports.
Canadians are starting to realize he’s a total fake, not as advertised, given recent polling from Main Street and Abacus. Party results are falling as is Carney’s approval rating
On this I suspect you will point to Preferred Prime Minister polling, but this is useless data as people interpret this question many different ways. What’s important here is party voting intention and approval rating, Carney’s is dropping like a stone as people wake up.
Ottawa has absolutely botched this as every other country has secured a trade deal, there is no excuse. Well there is one, the Liberals have no policy plan and can only win while playing Trump as the boogey man, so why get a deal when this is your only way to power?
Polling also shows that Canadians see affordability as the main issue and Trump and trade is falling down the list of top issues.
How is Carney’s promise on grocery prices working out? He said “you can judge my performance by the price of groceries”. I suspect he will he ask for another “participation trophy” on this failure?
So, some suggestions for future op eds… Michael Ma and the CCP connection; Bill Gates essay on climate change; Crime and drugs in Canada; Explosion in food bank use; immigration vs new housing construction and overload of healthcare; GDP per capita – worst in the G7; or the 4 to 5 liberal MP’s that will be resigning this spring; or the million dollar chartered jet to Egypt photo op.
Editor’s note – Nice to see you back – and I will leave it that.