OTTAWA — The Canadian Chamber of Commerce is calling on Ottawa to conduct a charm offensive to defend Canada’s trade interests in the U.S. ahead of November’s presidential election.
The group represents businesses of various sizes across Canada, and says now is the time for a co-ordinated outreach campaign by the federal, provincial and municipal governments to protect cross-border trade.
That campaign would involve private businesses and aim to convince Americans that Canada is a boon to the U.S. economy, ahead of the scheduled review of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement in 2026.
“Washington has increasingly come to see its bilateral relationship as not as strategic, but as transactional,” reads the letter dated last Friday.
“It would be a terrible mistake to think that we can wait until 2025 to ensure that CUSMA is preserved.”