Trump says he’s open to letting CUSMA expire

U.S. President Donald Trump said the United States may either let the Canada-U.S.-Mexico free trade agreement (CUSMA) expire next year, or negotiate a new deal.

The deal, which he was instrumental in negotiating in 2018 and is referred to as CUSMA in Canada and USMCA in the United States, is up for review next year.

“It expires in about a year, and we’ll either let it expire, or we’ll maybe work out another deal with Mexico and Canada,” Trump told reporters in the White House on Wednesday, when asked about the future of the deal.

Canada and Mexico had “taken advantage” of the U.S., Trump said.

“Mexico and Canada have taken advantage of the United States. It’s like just about every other country, in all fairness, it’s not them. I’m not blaming them. But every country because we had stupid people running our country,” Trump said.

The deal was signed during Trump’s first term in office and in 2020, after signing the deal, he praised the trade agreement.

“It’s the best agreement we’ve ever made,” Trump had said at the time.

This comes as U.S. trade representative Jamieson Greer told Politico that Trump could either walk away from the deal or negotiate separate deals with both Canada and Mexico.

“I mean, that’s always a scenario,” Greer said in an interview on Politico’s podcast The Conversation.

“The president’s view is he only wants deals that are a good deal. The reason why we built a review period into USMCA was in case we needed to revise it, review it or exit it,” he added.

Trump is also considering splitting the free trade agreement into two parts – one for Canada and one for Mexico – Greer said.

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“Our relationship with the Canadian economy is totally different than our relationship with the Mexican economy,” Politico’s daily politics newsletter Canada Playbook quoted Greer as saying.

“I mean, the labor situation is different. The stuff that’s being made is different. The export and import profile is different. It actually doesn’t make a ton of economic sense why we would marry those three together,” Greer said.

The U.S. Trade Representative is currently holding public hearings on its formal review of CUSMA, which began Wednesday and will conclude on Friday. The USTR will hear from business groups from both nations.

Canada launched its own formal review of the deal in September.

Canada is the largest export market for the U.S. and makes up one of the smallest trade deficits of any of the U.S.’s trade partners. In fact, without energy-exports, Canada runs a deficit with the U.S.

Since March, the U.S. has provided tariff relief for Canadian exports that are compliant with CUSMA. A recent RBC report pointed out that the CUSMA exemptions have been critical in buffeting not only the Canadian economy, but also U.S. manufacturers and importers against the worst impacts of Trump’s tariffs.