There was something almost comical about how quickly Canada — self-styled beacon of free trade and global diplomacy — moved to throw Mexico under the free-trade bus after Donald Trump retook the White House.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford led the charge, and before anyone could even call him an unsophisticated clod he had what seems to be broad agreement on this point from the other premiers. Then, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned that while he preferred the status quo, “we may have to look at other options” if Mexico doesn’t address “real and genuine concerns about Chinese investment into Mexico.” Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said she shared “grave concerns” about Chinese goods entering the free-trade zone through a Mexican back door.
It’s Trump’s show now. We’re all just background artists. We need the U.S. a hell of a lot more than we need Mexico.
I do have to wonder, though, how this looks to Trump. It doesn’t exactly telegraph strength or confidence heading into tariff discussions, does it? And it will be interesting to see which of the two countries can best assuage Trump’s concerns about trade and border security, and counter his negotiating tactics. I wouldn’t necessarily assume it’ll be Canada.
To begin with the silliest of Trump’s complaints, Canada is not a significant source of fentanyl entering the United States. Mexico very much is. (That could always change, of course. The RCMP reports that illicit fentanyl in Canada has shifted rapidly toward domestic rather than imported production.) Facts often don’t matter to Trump, but there’s nothing Canada can really do except point that out.
On the question of security risks at the border — from illegal migration to terrorism — Canada is on a much weaker footing. Last year U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 80 “encounters” with people on terrorism watchlists at the Mexican border, and 484 such “encounters” at the Canadian border.
I dare say that seems like a problem we should have been addressing even with a Democrat in the White House — not so much to appease Washington as to keep Canadians safe. But such unfancy matters have never been the Trudeau Liberals’ forte.
Then there’s Canada’s own mass-deportation plan — or lack thereof. Between September 2024 and December 2025, 4.9 million visas will expire. Some will be renewed, but many won’t be, as part of Liberal efforts to fix the immigration system that they decided to break for some reason.
Immigration Minister Marc Miller told the House of Commons immigration committee on Monday that he expected the vast majority would leave voluntarily when told, which isn’t just wishful thinking but would be a major logistical undertaking: 4.9 million is 14 per cent of the total number of passengers who boarded international flights (other than to the U.S.) at Canadian airports in 2023.
Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum spoke about the border on Wednesday. As you might expect, they offered rather different reports on the conversation. Trump claimed to have an agreement “effectively closing our southern border,” a notion that Sheinbaum explicitly disavowed. But they do agree that the issue of migrant caravans arriving at the U.S. border should now be a thing of the past, thanks to concerted efforts by Mexican authorities.
It’s difficult to predict what will happen when all those Canadian visas start expiring en masse, but even Trump’s America might look like a compelling option for many: For now, at least, it’s actually much easier to live undocumented in the United States than it is in Canada.
In any event, Canada couldn’t possibly hope to offer Washington similar assurances against illegal immigration. If we deployed every single RCMP officer to guard the Canada-U.S. border, there would still be more than two unguarded kilometres between each.
We don’t take human smuggling seriously. We don’t take criminal justice seriously, full stop. That’s not a quick fix. Thesingarasan Rasiah allegedly ran a human smuggling ring even as he lived under statutory release for a previous human-smuggling charge. Border and police officials have linked Rasiah’s outfit with the deaths of eight people trying to cross the St. Lawrence River into the U.S. last year. Two months after that incident, the government issued Rasiah a passport that he was forbidden even to apply for. The mistake was only discovered when police searched his apartment.
Ford said it’s nonsensical for Trump to lump Mexico in with Canada and he is right for many reasons. For one thing, it’s bloody odd that we’re in a free-trade zone with a country that’s one of the largest sources of successful asylum claims in Canada: Almost 3,000 last year, more than from Afghanistan, Sudan, Haiti, Syria or Yemen. (Admittedly that might say more about our refugee-determination system than it does about Mexico: No other country is remotely as welcoming to Mexican asylum-seekers. But that’s not a quick fix either.)
The problem with Canadian politicians’ obvious and logical thinking isn’t just that we’ll have to scramble to meet Washington’s demands, and might well fail. The problem is that if our arguments about free trade win the day — i.e., tariffs are bad; they’re paid by American consumers, not the target nations — Americans might well notice that they need Mexico nearly as much as they need us.
Canada is the United States’ biggest trading partner, but only just ahead of Mexico. Meanwhile Canada does six times as much trade with the United States as it does with any other partner, and more than with the entire rest of the world combined. It’s mouse versus elephant at the best of times, and these, alas, are not the best of times.
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