Some 143 witnesses sat before officials at public hearings held last year by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) on the future of North American trade. All made their case for the agreement that governs over a trillion dollars in cross-border commerce. They talked about jobs. They talked about factories. They talked about China. They talked about winning.
Nobody talked about free trade.
My colleagues and I analyzed the full transcript record as well as 993 written submissions filed by organizations in advance. What we found was an absence of terminology so complete that the omission cannot be characterized as a stylistic choice but rather a policy fact. The word “globalism” does not appear. “Comparative advantage” appears twice. The vocabulary that built the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which Canada has staked its prosperity on for 30 years, has been scrubbed from the most important trade talks on the continent.
Fortress North America replaces free trade
One moment from the hearings stays with me. Goldy Hyder, president of the Business Council of Canada, leaned into his microphone and told the room that “Fortress North America” was already the phrase American policymakers were using. Ontario Premier Doug Ford had for months been road-testing “Fortress Am-Can” to describe a potential “renewed strategic alliance.” By December, U.S. witnesses at the hearing were turning that proposal into a demand. “We should be building Fortress North America,” said the American Kitchen Cabinet Alliance.
Think about what that phrase does. It takes a decades-long trade agreement, rooted in the idea that lowering barriers between three countries would make all of them richer, and recasts it as a wall. Integration becomes perimeter defence. Speakers offered regional strength against China as motivation where openness once carried the argument. They touted jobs, communities, family budgets and food security where mutual gains from trade once grounded the case.
The principled case for open markets was replaced by an appeal to fairness, that is, changing the rules now would be unfair to firms that have already invested to comply. Each substitution sidesteps wording the U.S. administration treats as suspect and replaces it with language President Donald Trump’s administration has declared its own.
Trump’s tariffs changed the incentives
These substitutions were not freely chosen. Trump has imposed tariffs on Canadian steel, aluminum and softwood lumber and labelled Canada a national security threat. He has also demonstrated through public retaliation that a company defending trade on its own terms comes at a price. For example, the CEO of Walmart was targeted on social media after warning that tariffs would raise prices. “Fortress North America” is not a creative rebranding exercise. It is what remains available after the old vocabulary has been made dangerous to use for any company or industry group with business before the administration.
The result is a public record that reads as unanimous. The National Association of Manufacturers said, “When manufacturing wins, America wins.” Even American labour unions who want the agreement renegotiated accepted the new terms. They argued that the United-States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), negotiated during Trump’s first term had failed workers and communities.
How Canada can prepare for high-pressure U.S. demands on trade
But they made that argument on the administration’s terms: the agreement should be judged by what it delivers for workers, not by whether it advances open trade. Everyone involved in USTR proceedings – even the opposition – is speaking the same trade language now, because a political order with its own logic and its own enforcement has replaced the old language.
Canada’s new language comes with long-term costs
Here is what keeps me up at night about this. The vocabulary Canada endorsed in Washington does not stay in Washington. “Fortress North America” is a framework that defines Canada’s value to the United States as conditional on continuous alignment with American economic security priorities. Ford’s Am-Can growth plan says it explicitly: Any USMCA member should “match or exceed U.S. tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and other strategically important products or lose its seat at the table.” That sentence was written by Canadians. It will be quoted back to them.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has staked Canada’s trade future on diversification — new agreements with Europe, the United Kingdom and partners across Asia and the Pacific. Every one of those negotiations will require Canadian officials to argue that openness and rules-based arrangements serve all participants. There are no alternative terms for what Carney is trying to do. Yet those are the terms that Canada’s most prominent business voices in Washington have spent the past year helping to discredit.
The fortress argument is already turning against Canada
Washington is already using the new language against Canada. In April, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told Congress that Canada is “doubling down on globalization,” while the United States is trying to correct for the failures the administration feels globalization has caused. He also said the two approaches “don’t fit together very well.” He was talking about Carney’s pursuit of new trade agreements in Europe and Asia. The language Canada has helped install in Washington is now being turned against Canada’s own trade strategy. Greer used it to cast diversification as incompatible with the North American relationship Canada is trying to preserve.
Canada did not choose this contradiction. The coercion was real, the threats were specific and the fortress vocabulary may yet save the agreement when it is reviewed. But terminology endorsed by Canadian officials under duress does not expire if that pressure lifts. Every month that vocabulary succeeds in Washington, it becomes harder to rebuild a case for everything Canada needs beyond North America.
The risk is that Canada saves one agreement by discrediting the arguments it needs for all the others. Someone in Ottawa should be calculating that price. That means tracking, agreement by agreement, how the language Canada has endorsed in Washington constrains arguments Canadian negotiators can make in Brussels, London and Tokyo. The Trump administration is not going to calculate the price for us.
