Michael Wernick: Canada has world-class trade negotiators, but no deal escapes politics

Prime Minister Mark Carney boards a government plane on May 5, 2025. Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

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More than most large economies, Canada makes its living through trade and attracting investment and human capital. That makes us more interested than most in the rules that govern international commerce, so we have developed real depth in the tradecraft of negotiating, implementing and extracting the benefits from trade and investment deals.

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Canada has a deep bench of talent on which to draw. They come from a range of disciplines and skill sets. The trade lawyers approach “the art of the deal” through the mindset of deal sheets, contract language and future dispute resolution in courts and trade panels. The trade economists are skilled at estimating gains and losses at different levels of aggregation. Steeped in their academic training they overwhelmingly default to a perspective that more open is always better. They have a disdain for “political” considerations.

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There is also a broad supportive infrastructure of trade policy expertise spread across our universities and think tanks, arguably deeper than many other areas of public policy.

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We are good at the governance of trade policy. We have a lot of experience engaging other levels of government and setting up consultative bodies with labour, the private sector and civil society. We are fortunate to have real depth in negotiation. With no disrespect to our interlocuters, over several decades Canadian negotiating teams on trade and investment have been the best in class. I recall the efforts of the U.K. government in the months after the Brexit referendum to poach some of our key people.

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This should give Canadians some confidence that we are equipped to get through the current challenges, as should our track record in negotiating trade and investment agreements with partners in North America, Europe and Asia, opening doors for our private sector to step through.

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However, in the end, trade and investment deals are the zone where what is politically feasible or expedient on one side of the table meets what is feasible or expedient on the other. The close-to-final deal sheets are always bumped up to political leaders, and eventually to the very top.

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The vision of the top political leadership might be compared to wearing bifocals. Ambitious leaders like Brian Mulroney can have an eye on the long-term objectives and net benefits of reaching an agreement. But they also must look down through the lens of how much resistance and political pain they are about to take on and make a judgment about whether enough of it can be overcome or compensated.

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Deals, especially those that include compromises, always encounter the iron law that support will be diffused and general and opposition very focused and well organized. Time and time again, Canada’s business organizations have talked a good game in support of trade liberalization and then run for cover when specific industries object and resist. Political leaders won’t be that interested in aggregate polling. They want to know which specific stakeholders or geographic interests have been activated and what is their capacity to block the deal or hurt the governing party.

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But the other side is making similar calculations too. So really it is a negotiation of our politics with theirs.