Manitoba can’t afford to sit out the CUSMA conversation

On July 1, the trilateral review of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement quietly began.

There was no dramatic deadline, no cliff edge — CUSMA remains legally in force, extendable for another 16 years if Canada, the United States and Mexico agree, and reviewable annually if they don’t.

But “quiet” doesn’t mean low-stakes. Ottawa is currently negotiating with Washington over sectoral tariffs on steel, aluminum, autos and lumber — four industries that run straight through the Prairies.

So far, the conversation about what Canada should be asking for has been almost entirely a Central Canada conversation.

That’s a mistake, and Manitoba should be saying so.

Winnipeg sits at the junction of two of the country’s most important trade corridors: the CentrePort inland port and rail network that moves Prairie grain, potash and manufactured goods south and east, and an increasingly important gateway north through the Port of Churchill.

When national trade strategy gets set in Ottawa boardrooms, the assumptions baked into it are usually about auto plants in Ontario and energy infrastructure in Alberta.

Manitoba’s interests — agricultural export access, rail capacity and increasingly, the role Indigenous-led economic development plays in resource and infrastructure corridors — rarely make it into the room where the actual asks get drafted.

That absence has a cost.

CUSMA’s rule-of-origin requirements, its agricultural provisions and its dispute mechanisms all have disproportionate effects on export-dependent, resource-adjacent economies like Manitoba’s. If the federal government’s negotiating priorities are shaped without Prairie input, the province ends up living with terms it never had a seat in setting.

There’s a second, quieter piece of this that deserves more attention than it’s getting: Indigenous economic participation in the corridors CUSMA governs.

Manitoba is home to First Nations increasingly active as partners, not bystanders, in trade infrastructure, resource development and cross-border commerce. Any serious Manitoba trade strategy — federal or provincial — has to treat Indigenous economic sovereignty as core to the corridor, not an add-on.

Nations here are already building the governance and institutional capacity to participate as full economic actors in a renewed CUSMA framework.

The question is whether Ottawa’s negotiating position reflects that, or whether it’s still working from an outdated map.

None of this argues against CUSMA’s renewal.

The alternative — a significantly renegotiated or lapsed agreement — would raise costs and introduce exactly the kind of uncertainty Prairie exporters can least afford.

The Bank of Canada’s own base-case assumption is that CUSMA will be extended with limited changes.

That’s probably right, and probably the best outcome available. But “probably fine at the macro level” and “actually good for Manitoba” are not the same claim, and provincial and Indigenous voices need to be making the second argument loudly enough that it shapes the first.

Manitoba’s government, its business community and its First Nations governments all have a stake in this review, and all three should be pushing Ottawa for something specific: a formal channel for Prairie and Indigenous economic input into Canada’s CUSMA negotiating position, not just a briefing after the fact.

Quebec and Ontario don’t wait to be asked what they need from a trade agreement. Manitoba shouldn’t either.

The review process will run for months, possibly longer. That’s actually good news — it means there’s still time to get Manitoba’s priorities into the document that will govern our biggest trading relationship for the next decade and beyond.

But time only helps if someone uses it to show up.

Sandra Hodžić-Falk is founder and managing partner of Sorella Strategies, a Winnipeg-based government relations and public affairs firm.