The Clause.

The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement was drafted in 2020 with a feature no American trade agreement has used before. Every six years, the three governments would have to reconvene and confirm, on the record, whether they still wanted the thing. Congress worried at the time that a clause like this would simply generate uncertainty rather than resolve it. The three governments went ahead with it anyway, apparently satisfied that reconfirming a working agreement every six years was within the diplomatic capacity of three neighbours who trade two trillion dollars a year in each other's goods.

That appointment fell on the 1st of July, which was also Canada Day. Canada and Mexico confirmed they wanted to continue. The United States did not. Its trade representative, Jamieson Greer, said Washington would not renew the agreement "in its current form," a phrase that manages to be almost entirely uninformative while still closing a door. Nobody withdrew from anything. The treaty stayed in force, on paper, through to 2036. It simply stopped being an agreement either side could describe with much confidence, and became instead something to be checked on annually, the way a family checks on an aged aunt that nobody has quite decided is well.

Seven weeks later, the check-up produced its first result. Talks in Washington collapsed on the night of the 21st of August, hours before a new round of fifty per cent tariffs was due to take effect. Ottawa and Washington each blame the other for changing terms both had apparently already agreed. What matters rather more than who moved first is what the tariffs then applied to. Trade lawyers reviewing the measure pointed out that it reaches goods that are certified as fully compliant with the USMCA, which is the one category of goods the agreement exists specifically to protect. The agreement still says the goods qualify for preferential treatment. The government that negotiated that protection has simply found another statute under which to tariff them.

Its preferred legal basis for earlier tariffs, built on emergency economic powers, was struck down by the Supreme Court in February. The tariffs did not stop. Authority moved first to Section 232, then Section 338, each move a fresh piece of statutory paperwork wrapped around an unchanged appetite

The administration has also not entirely agreed with itself. Reporting since the collapse suggests Greer had reached terms with Ottawa earlier that week, and that the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, wanted more. Lutnick's statutory authority covers the tariffs themselves, autos, steel, aluminum, forestry, under a different section of trade law than the one Greer works under. He was also designated, when confirmed back in February last year, as leader of the administration's wider trade agenda, with what his own office called a "coordinating role" over USTR. Greer's formal authority to negotiate was never removed. It simply now shares a desk with a coordinating role that appears, in practice, to coordinate rather firmly. Greer's office had a deal. Lutnick's did not think it was good enough. Whether Canada broke that deal or the deal was never fully Greer's to make on his own is a question Ottawa and Washington will keep answering differently for as long as it suits them.

The sovereignty language followed: warnings about French labelling, then a revived suggestion from the President that Canada might quite like being the fifty-first state. These produced considerably better headlines than Article 34.7. The less spectacular problem had been sitting in the agreement since 2020.

This week brought the latest instalment: further fifty per cent tariffs on Canadian vehicles, parts and steel, due next year, layered on top of a dispute that was never really conducted through the agreement supposedly still governing it. Carney says Canada was attacked, and that he is not interested in a deal at any price. He may well be right on both counts. He is negotiating, in any case, with an institution that has not yet decided whether it still exists, which is a considerably harder thing to reach an agreement with.

The treaty remains, technically, in force until 2036. It will be reviewed again next July, and the July after that, by people no closer to a yes or a no than they were this summer.