Canada is approaching a defining economic moment.
U.S. President Donald Trump has made greater access to Canada’s dairy market one of his stated expectations for a CUSMA renewal.
Ottawa’s response has been swift and defensive.
Prime Minister Mark Carney said this week that supply management would remain untouched.
The U.S.-Canada relationship had a trying year in 2025, and 2026 promises more drama with a coming U.S. Supreme Court decision on President Donald Trump’s tariffs, the scheduled renegotiation of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) and U.S. midterm elections in November.
To kick off the new year with some perspective, National Post spoke this week with Christopher Sands, director of the Center for Canadian Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., to get his insights on the key bilateral issues to watch in the year ahead.
Ontario is paving the way for Premier Doug Ford’s controversial “special economic zones” in 2026 amid other changes that include making life tougher for impaired drivers and easier for skilled workers moving here.
Stepping up the push to fast-track development to offset economic damage from U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, new regulations taking effect Jan. 1 let the province bypass local and provincial rules for “trusted proponents and projects.”
But critics are worried protections for the environment, workers, wildlife, endangered species, Indigenous communities and their treaties will be watered down in what they dub “no law” zones.
Canadians are growing impatient with the lack of progress in Canada-U.S. trade relations, a new Leger poll suggests.
Confidence also appears to be waning over whether Canadians can trust Prime Minister Mark Carney to defend Canada against U.S. President Donald Trump’s political firestorms.
It became a rallying cry, a cultural touchstone, a marketing strategy and — our favourite — often described in international media as “a hockey term” or “a Canadian phrase.”
We are, of course, referring to “Elbows Up,” Gordie Howe’s signature move to ward off opponents.
The 2025 #ElbowsUp movement may have started as a response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to annex Canada, but it also came to symbolize the boycott of U.S. products as Trump’s tariffs launched a cross-border trade war.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — ‘Tis the season for renaming – everything from a cultural hub dedicated to a beloved slain president to new destroyers to 2025 itself. No, President Donald Trump hasn’t labeled the year with his name, but his U.S. Trade Representative, in a new op-ed, just dubbed it the “year of the tariff.”
OTTAWA — If emotions over U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and his comments about coveting Canada as a “51st state” defined the posture of political leaders towards the cross-border relationship in 2025, business leaders are urging that cool heads prevail in the new year.
With Canada set to begin formal talks with the U.S. over its trilateral agreement with Mexico in January, National Post asked different leaders in business and labour about their hopes for how Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government approaches the deal’s joint review and what lessons elected officials could learn from the past year.
Many Canadians are looking to buy a new car in the near future — but amid the trade war, the majority say they would prefer that their cars be made entirely in Canada.
As many as six in 10 Canadians (61 per cent) said they are looking to buy a new car in the next five years, with more than three-quarters (76 per cent) worried that trade tensions and U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs will make vehicles unaffordable, a new KPMG survey released Monday showed.
With Canada entering into a pivotal review of its North American trade deal in the new year, the kind of unified support for Ottawa’s position which was seen during the NAFTA renegotiations has yet to take shape, says a member of the prime minister’s Council on Canada-United States Relations.
Prime Minister Mark Carney (Nepean, Ont.) and Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc (Beauséjour, N.B.) have conducted trade talks with the Americans without broad engagement from opposition parties or consultations across Canadian society.
At the end of March, tensions erupted at Titan Tool and Die, an auto parts company with operations in Windsor and nearby Warren, Mich.
On the Canadian side, unionized workers tried to block the company from shipping products to the United States. Titan, which makes custom stamping tools used to shape vehicles, wanted to rush those products across the border ahead of imminent U.S. tariffs targeting the auto industry.
We are about to embark on 2026. Should we look ahead with optimism, pessimism or trepidation? Essentially, it is unknown as the crazy man in the White House continues his rampage, destroying what were warm relations between Canada and the United States and turning them to ice.
Most Canadians know how to deal with ice so we should have the upper hand. But first let’s look back at what Donald Trump has done to change the temperature. Past actions foretell the future, so they say, and in Trump’s case it’s a good bet that his actions will only get worse.
At some point even the Elbow People will have to acknowledge that rule by the Liberal Party clique, including Carney’s tenure has been a disaster for Canada.
In Canada the LPC is the Great Satan and Trump but a junior one.
On a Saturday night in late October, I was at a wedding reception, surreptitiously checking my phone for the Blue Jays’ score.
That’s when I saw the text message from a journalist.
“Any chance of a quick comment re Trump’s latest insanity?”
I silently spoke the words uttered by countless Canadians, countless times this year: What’s he done now?
You can feel the Star’s terror!
WASHINGTON – The people anxiously sipping hot chocolate in the Canadian Embassy in Washington on a cold night in January almost a year ago couldn’t have predicted the roller-coaster of trade provocations and bilateral blow-ups the next 12 months would bring.
In hindsight, that unusually chilly Washington evening foreshadowed how the Canada-U.S. relationship would soon freeze over.
Trump’s tariff threats and his talk of annexing Canada had already rattled Canadian politics over the preceding weeks. A rushed trip to Mar-a-Lago in early November 2024 failed to mend former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s already rocky relationship with the incoming U.S. president.
The era of North American free trade is over.
That point was hammered home by the report on the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement sent to Congress last week by the U.S. Trade Representative, a prelude to the formal review of the deal set to start in July, but which could get underway earlier.
While it can be read several ways, the report, and USTR Jamieson Greer’s oral comments, reveal that even if the USMCA continues to tick over during the 2026 review, there will be tough demands by the Trump team for concessions from Canada and Mexico, backstopped by the threat of U.S. withdrawal from the agreement on six months notice.
The organization that represents some of America’s largest spirits producers is calling for the NSLC to remove a policy that gives preferential markup to Nova Scotian spirit products.
In a recent 77-page report sent to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States outlined trade barriers they face in different countries.
The Canada section covers six pages, where the barriers include the boycott on selling American alcohol in most provinces and preferential markups on local spirits in Alberta, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, P.E.I., Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador.
