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.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs might have been named The Canadian Press News Story of the Year, but Prime Minister Mark Carney’s failure to adequately deal with them ought to have been.
When Carney announced his candidacy for the leadership of the Liberal party, after former prime minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation early last year, Carney sold himself to Canadians as the man who could meet the moment and deal with the Trump juggernaut.
The Diageo-owned property in Amherstburg, Ont., that bottles Crown Royal whisky has been listed for sale as the company prepares to shut down operations at the site early in 2026.
The property, with a 110 St. Arnaud St. address, appeared on REALTOR.ca on Monday, with annual land taxes listed at just over $310,000.
The industrial property, near Sandwich Street South and Alma Street, spans about 25 hectares (70.41 acres) and includes eight buildings totalling nearly 447,000 square feet. The listing notes direct rail access, secured yard space, trailer parking and clear heights ranging from 20 to 26 feet.
Canadians continued to take fewer trips to the United States in October, according to the latest data, which mirrors recent monthly data suggesting the trade war and U.S. tariffs have left a sour taste.
Statistics Canada reported on Monday that in October, there was a 26.3 per cent drop in Canadian residents returning from trips to the U.S. compared with one year earlier.
For Tina Nguyen, a Canadian muralist in Belleville, Ontario, Christmas is part of another nativity story: the birth of her hair-accessory business. It all started six years ago, when Ms. Nguyen gave a cousin one of her handmade, pillowy hair scrunchies, inspiring her to sell them on the internet, where they quickly became a hit.
But this Christmas will be the end of that story. President Trump’s protectionist policies have put a significant dent in sales, said Ms. Nguyen, whose company, XXL Scrunchie & Co., relies on American shoppers for half its business.
A mandatory review of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico-Agreement on trade kicks into high gear next year as U.S. President Donald Trump continues his campaign to realign global trade and poach key industries from America’s closest neighbours.
Negotiations on the trade pact, better known as CUSMA, were a stress test for Ottawa during the first Trump administration. The trade talks were tense at times, but ultimately the pact that replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement was hailed a success in all three countries.
Since the president’s return to office, however, confidence in CUSMA’s future has waned. During a meeting with Prime Minister Mark Carney at the White House, Trump called the deal “transitional” and said it may have served its purpose.
