USA

Mexico and Canada, pushed into a three-nation trade deal by their powerful neighbor in between, have for decades viewed each other with a mix of disinterest and distrust.

Now, their leaders, driven by President Trump’s extensive new tariffs and threats to their countries’ sovereignty, are talking about ways to team up.

“It’s very much an all-hands-on-deck approach to ensure that we are kick-starting” the relationship, Canada’s foreign affairs minister, Anita Anand, told reporters this month, alongside Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne.

Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke to his U.S. counterpart by phone Thursday — the first time the leaders have spoken since the two sides failed to reach a deal on a trade agreement earlier this month.

According to a short readout from the Prime Minister’s Office, Carney and U.S. President Donald Trump “discussed current trade challenges, opportunities and shared priorities” in what officials described as a “productive and wide-ranging conversation.”

The United States has placed sanctions on a Canadian judge and three other judges who sit on the International Criminal Court (ICC), saying they authorized ICC investigations into U.S. personnel in Afghanistan.

The U.S. State Department said in an Aug. 20 statement that judge Kimberly Prost was sanctioned after authorizing an ICC investigation into potential alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan since 2003. The Appeals Chamber of the ICC decided unanimously to authorize the investigation in March 2020.

Food inflation has returned as a problem for Canadian households. According to Statistics Canada, food prices rose 3.3% in July, outpacing overall inflation by 1.6 percentage points. Unlike past cycles, this spike cannot be blamed on volatile global markets. The cause lies much closer to home — in our own policy decisions.

Coffee prices surged 28.6%, confectionery 11.8%, and fresh fruit 3.9%, with grapes alone up nearly 30%. Since March 2025 — when Ottawa ended the GST holiday that had distorted winter data — food inflation has exceeded the overall CPI by an average of 1.4 points. A large part of this gap stems from the counter-tariffs imposed on essential imports, many of which lack viable domestic substitutes.

Mark Carney’s government has been trying to reach a new trade accord with the U.S., but most Canadians are skeptical that President Donald Trump will keep his word on any deal.

Four in five Canadians say they think it’s unlikely that Trump would honour a future trade agreement with their country, according to a poll by Nanos Research Group conducted for Bloomberg News.

Where was Canada when the world gathered in Washington to decide the future of Ukraine? Where was our prime minister when President Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Emmanuel Macron, and Keir Starmer took historic steps toward peace?

Nowhere.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford recently declared on CNN that in Canada, U.S. President Donald Trump is the “most disliked politician in the world . . . because he has attacked his closest family member.” In January, just before Mark Carney announced his leadership bid for the Liberal Party, he appeared on The Daily Show and told Americans that Canada and the United States could be “friends with benefits.” Are prominent U.S. leaders making time for media appearances to defend Canada as their “closest family member”?

Believing that trading partners are family, or friends even, betrays our leaders’ wide-eyed view of the world that not even historical precedent appears able to shake. It has invited complacency and deepens the damaging economic consequences when trade relationships evolve or break apart.

OTTAWA – Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford put the focus on making Canada globally competitive rather than securing a trade deal with the United States as they met in Ottawa on Monday.

Carney and Ford were meeting on Parliament Hill as trade talks with the United States show little signs of progressing.

Ford was asked by reporters after the meeting Monday what he felt the chances were for a tariff-free deal with the United States, but he said U.S. President Donald Trump’s behaviour was “unpredictable.”