Editorial | Don’t emulate Canada!

As the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) prepares for Donald Trump’s return as United States president, they have from Canada and Mexico a strategy that is not to be emulated.

There is no need to grovel, or for CARICOM’s members to throw each other under the bus, which is emerging as the preferred path of the Canadians. That only plays into Mr Trump’s favourite tactic of divide and rule.

Instead, the region must respectfully, but forthrightly and as good neighbours, engage the incoming administration on the matters that are important to it. That, as this newspaper advised previously, requires the community determining what are its priorities, fashioning a strategy for pursuing them, and establishing clear red lines that won’t be crossed.

In preparing for this, CARICOM should already be synthesising these priorities, while working back channels to the Trump transition team for an early meeting with the new president, once he takes office. Put another way, the partners in the 15-member group should not allow themselves to be individually picked by the Trump administration, as happened when he was previously in office.

Therein lies the warning against emulating Canada and Mexico.

Washington, Mexico City and Ottawa are partners in a trilateral trade pact called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), negotiated by the first Trump administration to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which Mr Trump, at the time, argued was disadvantageous to the United States.

Individually, Mexico and Canada are now the US’s two biggest trading partners. In 2023, for instance, Mexico exported US$475 billion in goods to the US, surpassing China as the top exporter to America. The US exported US$323 billion in goods to Mexico, which put their bilateral trade at US$798 billion.

On the other hand, Canada exported $419 billion worth of goods to the US, placing it third after China (US$427 billion). It bought US$354 billion worth of American products, putting their two-way trade at US$773 billion.

When another US$50 billion of Canada-Mexico trade is added to the mix, intra-USMCA trade in 2023 was worth more than US$1.6 trillion, or over five per cent of global trade.

VITAL TO THEIR ECONOMIES

But, more important for Mexico and Canada, access to America’s market is vital to their economies. That gives US policymakers a powerful lever, which Mr Trump has threatened to use to force the two neighbours to do more to stem the flow of illegal migrants and the synthetic opioid, fentanyl, across the borders they share with the US. His specific threat a week ago was to impose a 25 per cent tariff on all goods entering the United States from the two countries.

Although the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has made muted statements supportive of Canada-Mexico relations, he has hardly pushed back against suggestions by several Canadian officials, especially provincial premiers, that Ottawa should go it alone and negotiate a bilateral trade agreement with the US, even before the USMCA comes up for formal review in 2026. If the partners agree after that review, the trade pact could continue up to 2036.

In the face of Mr Trump’s threats, the Canadian prime minister went on a placating mission to the president-elect’s home, Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, where he reportedly told Mr Trump that “the situation on the northern border was vastly different than the Mexican border”, notorious as a hotbed for illegal crossings.

Doug Ford, the premier of Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, and one of the proponents of Canada going it alone, declared it “the most insulting thing” that Canada would be lumped with Mexico for Mr Trump’s ire.

For his effort at mollifying Mr Trump, Prime Minister Trudeau was rewarded with ridicule by the president-elect.

“I spoke with Canada and Justin came flying right in because we talked about 25 per cent tariffs,” Mr Trump said at a function last week. “That’s just the beginning.”

‘51! 51!’

Mr Trump’s supporters in the audience chanted “51! 51!”, to Mr Trump’s previous reference (which his officials said was a joke) of Canada becoming the US’s 51st state.

The Canada-Mexico relationship may be mendable, but the rhetoric of Canadian officials and the pushback by the new Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, insisting that her country must be respected, has severely stressed the partnership. Putting things back on track will need skilled diplomacy.

As mostly small-island and low-to-middle-income developing states, the Caribbean countries do not have the leverage of Mexico and Canada to pursue individual agendas with the US. And even those countries are comparatively weak.

Indeed, the effects, and deeper threats, of climate change, and the dangers to security of the Caribbean from the flow of illegal guns from the United States, are matters best addressed as a collective rather than as individual small states. Cutting backdoor, transactional deals may, in the short term, appear valuable. But, as the leaders of the European Union appeared to recognise early, and Canada and Mexico will likely learn, it is not the best strategy.