To the Point for the Week of June 7, 2026
To the Point for the Week of June 7, 2026
Was Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s position right the entire time? A 2016 article in The Atlantic provides important lessons for CUSMA discussions.
ONTARIO
Does Doug Ford Owe Danielle Smith an Apology?
In the early days of the Canada-US trade dispute, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith took diametrically opposed positions on how Canada should respond. Premier Ford moved quickly toward retaliating against US tariffs with retaliatory measures and tough talk (some would call it antagonizing), broadly in line with the initial federal impulse to hit back. By contrast, Premier Danielle Smith’s approach was more diplomacy-first and broadly opposed to retaliatory tariffs, going as far as refusing to sign the January 2025 joint premiers’ statement on retaliatory tariffs.
The backroom tension between these two positions often spilled into public feuding. When Premier Smith insisted that oil export taxes be removed as a condition for her signature on the joint declaration, one that Premier Ford personally coordinated, Ford snapped back, “you protect your jurisdiction, but country comes first.” Under pressure from Premier Ford to use Alberta energy as leverage in trade talks, Smith accused him of window-dressing Ontario-centric positions as national solidarity by weaponizing Alberta energy.
A lot has changed since then. The national drive to reduce inter-provincial trade barriers has stalled, and the need to diversify Canada’s trade and economic relationships away from the US has lost momentum in the face of economic realities, despite a broad political consensus on both. Like Carney, the Premier’s signal this week in the form of an op-ed in the Financial Post arguing for deeper integration with the United States under a Fortress North America concept suggests a kind of mea culpa on US-Canada relations and lends credence to the argument that Premier Danielle Smith’s approach may have been appropriate and reasonable in the long term, although politically difficult to sell to a concerned public and defend against political attacks at the time.
What’s interesting is that for a short period, Smith and Ford held comparable positions on the approach to US-Canada trade. In January 2025, the Ford government released Building Fortress Am-Can: Ontario’s Am-Can Growth Plan, which contained three shared pillars of interest – economic prosperity, strategic resource development and border security – and was framed as “a renewed strategic alliance between America and Canada that’s a beacon of stability, security and long-term prosperity.” Prior to Danielle Smith’s solo trip to Mar-a-Lago to further her position of diplomacy over retaliation, she released a statement framing the two nations’ tensions as “an opportunity for greater partnership” and called for more resource infrastructure and extraction capabilities as the foundation for deeper continental integration. Like Ford’s Fortress Am-Can, Smith emphasized the need for strategic cooperation on critical minerals, border security and energy integration.
So why did Ford pivot and then come full circle while Premier Smith has largely maintained her position on what she considers to be an appropriate response to US tariffs? It’s simple, really, and rests on two considerations. First, Premier Ford was preparing to call a snap election and, with the national mood being anti-American (and specifically anti-Trump), a measured, nuanced response to a major economic shock was not a politically defensible position. Second, the Premier, who hasn’t shied away from highlighting his close political relationship with the Prime Minister, became politically invested in Carney’s economic strategy and believed this was the most appropriate approach both politically and economically.
With Ottawa and Queen’s Park now focused on salvaging CUSMA and talking up Fortress North America, Danielle Smith’s early emphasis on diplomacy and partnership looks less like an outlier and more like an alternative path that was on the table from the start. Reasonable people can disagree on whether Doug Ford owes her an apology, but it is harder to argue that her approach was reckless or naïve. On the evidence, it was one of the plausible strategies Canada could have chosen to keep North American free trade intact.
FEDERAL
Take Him Seriously, Not Literally
Writing in The Atlantic in 2016, journalist Salena Zito wrote a campaign-trail report on Donald Trump’s first presidential bid and observed how Trump’s supporters and the news media consume and interpret candidate Trump’s statements differently. Zito found that while often Trump would inflate statistics used in his speeches, his supporters were more often drawn to the narrative built around those statistics rather than the accuracy of his statements themselves that resonated most.
Conversely, news organizations often focused on the literal substance of his speeches, statements and social media posts in ways that overlooked why many people in these communities found Trump so appealing. Zito wrote, “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally,” a line that later became a common way of explaining the overwhelming collective sense of shock among liberals when candidate Trump was elected.
Zito’s observation ten years ago still resonates today, and the news media and politicians continue to misread the signals. Take, for example, Trump’s repeated intent to take control of Greenland. If you take Trump literally, you may strongly believe the 82nd Airborne is at the ready to invade. If you take him seriously, it’s a signal to the Europeans to take Greenland’s strategic importance seriously as a platform for monitoring and restricting Russian vessels from accessing the North Atlantic.
In the Canadian context, the collective, vociferous reaction of the nation’s political psyche to President Trump’s repeated declarations to make Canada the 51st state illustrates the same dynamic. If Zito’s lessons were taken seriously, there’s an argument to be made that if our political class took Trump’s repeated comments seriously, rather than literally, Fortress North America as a concept may have taken off sooner.
Taking Trump seriously but not literally may be the key that picks the lock of CUSMA negotiations. U.S. Ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra – another American political figure that should be taken seriously, but not literally – laid out for Canada’s negotiators how to approach CUSMA discussions. Speaking at the Eurasia Group’s 2026 U.S.-Canada Summit in Toronto this week, Hoekstra turned Zito’s observations into insights into negotiations. Trump earlier this week stated that the United States was “not looking to renew” CUSMA in reference to the upcoming July 1st renewal deadline. He went on, “We don’t need anything that Canada has, we don’t need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that we have.” Of course, the immediate reaction to the President’s remarks is frustration, simply needless prodding of a friend and ally. Yet, Hoekstra clarified what exactly that means for Canada in its approach to negotiations. The ambassador advised that “we don’t need anything from Canada” should be interpreted as “America has a lot of needs” and insisted that Canada present itself as the supplier of choice of those needs, using potash as a prime example, since the alternative suppliers to Canada are Russia and Belarus. Hoekstra also alluded to a willingness to explore opportunities for Canada to benefit from America’s explicit efforts to reshore manufacturing due to the integrated supply chains our countries share. Reciprocity, not dependence or transforming Canada into a U.S. vassal state.
Obviously, it would be easier if the President was more direct, rather than driving us all insane trying to decipher his latest stream of consciousness. Nevertheless, at the same conference at which Hoekstra spoke, Minister responsible for Canada-U.S. Trade, Dominic LeBlanc, expressed his optimism of a deal being made to extend CUSMA. That, according to the Minister, appears to be conditional depending on bilateral agreements he anticipates will be ironed out before the desired sixteen-year extension on the free trade agreement is agreed upon. LeBlanc previously stated that Canada has already submitted proposals (though Canadians have no insight into exactly what those proposals contained) for U.S. trade representatives to review, possibly aligned with Hoekstra’s recommendation. Discussions haven’t formally materialized yet, but signals by both sides suggest a mutually beneficial agreement is highly probable.
Christopher Mourtos, writing on behalf of ONpoint Strategy Group
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