Carney cozying up with Mexico will backfire, again
Don’t think for a moment that this isn’t being noticed in Washington. They are taking all of this into account and not in a good way.
Author of the article:Brian Lilley
Published Sep 18, 2025 • 3 minute read
Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney is welcomed by Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum at the National Palace in Mexico City on Sept. 18, 2025.
Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney is welcomed by Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum at the National Palace in Mexico City on Sept. 18, 2025.
When NAFTA was being renegotiated in 2017, Canada took a bold step and tried to forge a united front with Mexico against the United States. It failed miserably and Canada was frozen out of trade talks resulting in the U.S. working out a deal with Mexico while Canada sat on the sidelines.
I bring this up in the context of Mark Carney heading to Mexico in what looks like a replay of the 2017-18 plan to try to form a united front against the Trump administration.
Carney was welcomed with pomp and circumstance in Mexico City by President Claudia Sheinbaum. The two were expected to discuss trade, security arrangements, work visas, and combatting organized crime in areas such as drug and gun smuggling.
There was even talk of a strategic partnership agreement being signed.
Don’t think for a moment that this isn’t being noticed in Washington. They are taking all of this into account and not in a good way.
According to several reports, Canadian and American negotiators haven’t had serious talks since the end of August. That’s three weeks ago on a file that is vitally important to the Canadian economy.
Earlier this week, Carney made it seem like he was on good terms with Trump.
“At this moment, we have the best agreement in the world with the Americans, as well as the lowest imposed tariff rate in the world,” Carney boasted under questioning from Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-François Blanchet. “The President of the United States is a modern man: he has a cell phone. I speak with him regularly and we exchange text messages.”
That’s a far cry from his message during the election campaign even though the American tariff threat has not changed since then.
“President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us,” Carney said on April 28, election night.
Carney used anti-American rhetoric to win the election, it was politically popular for him to do so. That said, the Americans took note of this, they paid attention when we said the relationship is over, when we said we wouldn’t buy their products or vacation in the United States anymore.
As much as Canadians were bothered by Trump’s 51st state bluster, Americans are bothered by what we have been saying about them. There was a window to find a broader deal, but that window appears to have closed.
Speaking at an event in Ottawa this week, Trump’s ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra said the time for a bigger deal has passed.
“Whether it’s on trade, whether it’s energy, whether it’s automotive, whether it’s nuclear defence and all those types of things, we were hoping that we would not just renegotiate CUSMA but that we could take it into being something much bigger,” Hoekstra said. “It’s obvious, at least at this point in time, that that’s not going to happen.”
While Hoekstra talks of a bigger deal, the reality on the ground is that the Americans, the Trump administration, were looking for deals at the 50,000-foot level with details to be worked out later.
That is what they achieved with Britain, China, the EU and so many others, a kind of framework agreement.
We rebuffed that type of agreement, said no over and over again or tried to negotiate into the weeds. The Americans didn’t want to go there and so no deal was reached.
Instead of admitting they screwed up, the Carney team went from making what Trump was doing into the apocalypse to the best deal in the world.
Now we are trying a new tact, cozy up to Mexico, form a united front. It didn’t work in 2017-18 and it won’t work this time.
Seems we are incapable of learning from our history and doomed to repeat it.
Seems we are incapable of learning from our history and doomed to repeat it.
torontosun.com
