Written by Patrick Kennedy, Principal, Public Affairs.
The most dangerous assumption in Canada-U.S. trade may be that the old relationship is coming back.
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot begins with four words: “Nothing to be done.”
For Canadian and American businesses waiting for some semblance of normal to return to the world’s most consequential bilateral trading relationship, the past year and a half has occasionally had a Beckettian quality. Wait for the next tariff deadline. Wait for the negotiations. Wait for the next Truth Social post. Wait for CUSMA/USMCA. Wait for the mid-terms. Wait for things to settle down.
As of writing, we are apparently also waiting to find out what we are supposed to call Lake Ontario.
There is only one problem with waiting for Godot: he never comes. And there is one important difference between Beckett’s protagonists and those of us trying to navigate Canada-U.S. relations in 2026: while we are waiting, there is plenty to be done.
The most dangerous assumption in Canada-U.S. trade right now may be that this is a temporary problem. To be clear, much of what we are experiencing is temporary. Tariff rates will change. Negotiations will resume. Political leaders will come and go. But the old relationship is not coming back.
Prime Minister Mark Carney said as much after walking away from trade negotiations last week: “America has changed, and … we will not return to our old relationship.” For generations, Canadian economic strategy rested on a set of fairly durable assumptions: whatever disagreements arose between Ottawa and Washington, access to the American market, a shared commitment to rules-based trade and the basic reliability of the economic relationship could largely be taken for granted.
That assumption has been broken.
A conscious uncoupling, of a different kind
This does not mean Canada and the United States are decoupling. Geography alone makes that fanciful, before we even get to integrated supply chains, energy, infrastructure, capital, families and the countless relationships that cross the border every day. What Canada is beginning instead is a conscious uncoupling of a different kind: uncoupling its economic strategy from the assumption of permanent American reliability.
From my vantage point, divided these days between Chicago and Ottawa, the distinction is important. In Ottawa, there is urgency around diversifying trade with other partners, strengthening domestic capacity and reducing vulnerabilities from relying too heavily on one market. In Chicago, the depth of the relationship looks equally obvious. Canada is a customer, supplier, investor, energy source, tourist, neighbour and friend. The economic geography that produced this relationship has not changed because the politics have.
Both things can be true at once. Canada needs to reduce the risks created by dependence on the United States. Canadian and American businesses simultaneously have an enormous interest in preserving the benefits created by our interdependence.
Canadians increasingly appear to understand this. Polling immediately after last week’s collapse in negotiations found 76 per cent thought their government was right to walk away rather than accept the deal on offer, while nearly two-thirds believe Canada can emerge stronger by reducing its dependence on the United States. This is not simply another tariff dispute. Canadians and Americans (or at least the American government) are increasingly experiencing two different versions of the same relationship. For many Canadians, the question is no longer how quickly we can get back to normal. It is whether the old normal left us too exposed in the first place.
Stop predicting. Start preparing.
Much of my work lately involves helping companies make decisions in this environment. What does this morning’s announcement actually mean? Which threats should be taken literally? What might change next week? What remains true regardless of what happens next week?
The temptation is to search for certainty. I think that is increasingly the wrong exercise. The answer to unpredictability isn’t prediction. It’s preparation.
That means understanding exposure, building scenarios, creating optionality and knowing which developments are political weather, and which represent structural change. It means anticipating needs and building relationships before they are urgently needed and then making decisions that remain sensible across several plausible outcomes rather than betting everything on one forecast.
In other words, we must stop waiting for the all-clear. There may not be one.
As of this writing, negotiations are suspended, Canada and the United States are again imposing tariffs on each other, and political rhetoric is escalating. By the time you read this, one or more of those statements may already be out of date.
That is precisely the point.
The relationship beneath the relationship
There is another danger in accepting that the old normal is gone: allowing a trade war to become a relationship war. A lot has changed in how Canadians feel about the United States. Canadians are travelling south less, buying Canadian more deliberately and thinking about economic sovereignty in ways that would have seemed overwrought only a few years ago.
Yet the reservoir of goodwill on the other side of the border remains striking. Recent polling found nearly three-quarters of Americans still hold a favourable view of Canada. The political relationship has deteriorated faster than the human one.
That leaves us something important to work with.
As Washington and Ottawa become less predictable, the relationships beneath them become more valuable: governor to premier, mayor to mayor, company to company, supplier to customer, Chicago to Toronto, and person to person. They cannot eliminate tariffs or settle a trade negotiation, but they create resilience and remind decision-makers that this country to country relationship is not an abstraction measured only in trade deficits and tariff schedules. It is an economic ecosystem built over generations.
Preserving that ecosystem while Canada reduces its vulnerability within it may be the defining bilateral challenge of the next several years.
Which brings me back to Beckett. His characters wait for someone else to arrive with the answer. They wait because perhaps tomorrow will be different.
My other favourite writer, Aaron Sorkin, tends to give his characters a little less patience. He gave President Jed Bartlet a rather different response to the problems that landed on his desk in The West Wing. After the crisis, the argument, the victory or the defeat, Bartlet would invariably turn to his staff and ask: “What’s next?”
For businesses on both sides of the border, it seems the better question.
Waiting for normal isn’t a strategy. Getting ready for what’s next is.