The New ART of the Deal: Trump Administration Agreements on Reciprocal Trade and Canada

Canada is now in, and will be for the foreseeable future, a period of sustained trade tension with the United States. But so is the rest of the world. This is important because the tension within North America over trade is impacted by the broader global tensions of other countries contending with American attempts to rewrite global trade rules.

Yet, discussions in Canada outside of specialized media and policy circles do not link the global negotiations with those in North America and certainly not with the U.S.-Canada negotiations.

This is a consequential omission.

Since 2025, the United States has negotiated a series of Agreements on Reciprocal Trade (ART) with, as of this writing, 21 countries, including four that already had comprehensive free-trade agreements (FTA) with the U.S. in place. The new ARTs, which range from formal FTAs to frameworks to memorandums to news releases, are executive arrangements negotiated, implemented, modified and ended by President Donald Trump with no congressional participation, let alone approval. They give the Trump administration extraordinary power, flexibility and speed to impose new trade conditions and adjust them as it wishes without much in the way of real time constraint and only slow, arduous court proceedings as a constraint after damage has been done and concessions extracted.

This paper is part of the Research Workshop Series. The Research Workshop Series contains reports of varying word counts that provide in-depth analysis of existing research and data on urgent policy issues OR the collected observations and insights from policy discussion events and conferences. They focus on extracting thoughts on policy problems from current subject-matter experts and are subject to a non-academic standard of review.