1. A long call before the Asia trip sets the tone
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke to reporters in Manila on Saturday, November 14, ahead of a three-day ASEAN summit that starts Sunday. He said he had held a long and substantive conversation with President Donald Trump just before his trip through Europe and Asia. United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Stephen Miller, the new White House chief of staff, also took part in the call. Carney told reporters the two countries are making progress toward a trade deal, and he added that a bilateral agreement is possible. He stopped short of calling it a breakthrough: the two sides are not there yet.
The call matters because talks between Ottawa and Washington collapsed in August, after last-minute American demands that Canada found unacceptable. Washington then imposed tariffs of 50 percent on about 20 billion dollars in Canadian goods, and Canada answered with retaliatory tariffs in September. Since then the two governments have returned to the table, and Carney said last week that talks had picked up because Washington was moving closer to Canada's position. The Manila remarks are the clearest sign yet from the Canadian side that the renewed talks have real momentum behind them.
Carney chose his words with care. He did not promise a signing date, and he did not describe the shape of a final text. What he offered was a status report: progress, possibility, and a firm limit. For businesses on both sides of the border, that combination reads as a signal to prepare for a deal without betting on one. The next test will be whether negotiators can turn a leaders' call into written terms that survive contact with the tariff schedules both sides have already put in place.
2. Autos are the line Canada will not cross
Carney made the auto industry the test of any deal. He said his government will not settle for an agreement that is not consistent with a viable Canadian auto sector, and he repeated the point in Manila after describing the call with Trump. The industry has been battered by American tariffs, and Ontario plants sit at the center of a supply chain in which parts and vehicles cross the border many times before a finished car reaches a buyer. A tariff on autos taxes that whole chain, and it falls on workers, suppliers and dealers in both countries.
The tariff picture on autos is still unresolved. Section 232 duties of 25 percent apply to autos and trucks, and the United States has offered to cut its tariff on cars and light trucks to 15 percent. Canada has pushed back, because it wants larger Canadian-built trucks included in any relief. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has been pushing to restart talks that stalled in August, with Section 232 tariffs as the target, and Canada's ambassador to the United States, Mark Wiseman, has called for the removal of tariffs imposed under Sections 232 and 338 of American trade law.
The auto condition also shapes the politics of a deal at home. Carney told reporters in Manila that Washington had dropped demands touching Canadian culture, protections for the French language and Canada's freedom to sign trade agreements with other partners. Those withdrawals remove some of the most sensitive items from the table, and they leave the auto sector as the main point where Ottawa still needs to show it protected Canadian jobs. A deal that trades away the industry would be hard to defend in Parliament, whatever tariff relief it bought elsewhere.
3. The August collapse still sets the terms
The August breakdown explains why Carney is careful with his words now. Talks fell apart when Washington added demands at the last minute that Ottawa found unacceptable, and the collapse was followed within weeks by the 50 percent tariff on about 20 billion dollars in Canadian goods. Canada answered with retaliatory tariffs in September, and the two governments have spent the months since trying to rebuild a path to an agreement. The Manila call is the latest step on that path, and it follows a November 1 conversation in which both leaders said they had moved closer to a deal.
Trump has described the shape of a possible agreement in broad terms. After the November 1 call he told reporters the two sides had the concept of a very good deal with Canada, and he said the scope could include the Keystone XL pipeline project and an arrangement under which American farmers would pay no tariffs on Canadian products. No final details have been confirmed by either side, and Carney has said he cannot be certain a signed agreement would be honoured. The gap between a concept and a signed text is where past talks have failed, and it is the gap negotiators must now close.
The stakes are large for both economies. Goods traded between the two countries in the first nine months of 2026 came to roughly 570 billion dollars, and a deal could ease duties on steel and aluminum as well as autos. Tariffs became an issue in the American midterm elections, with Democrats blaming them for higher prices and pledging to challenge them. That leaves Canada with a choice: accept a deal that lowers some of Trump's tariffs while leaving others in place, or hold out for free trade while Congress prepares to contest the duties. Carney's remarks suggest Ottawa is testing the first option, but only on terms it can defend.
4. ASEAN gives Ottawa a second front
Carney delivered his trade update in Manila for a reason. While he spoke about Washington, he also announced that Canada had substantially concluded free-trade negotiations with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a bloc of nearly 700 million people, and completed separate negotiations with the Philippines. Both agreements are part of a deliberate effort to reduce Canada's dependence on the United States during Trump's trade war, and they give Ottawa something to show for a trip that began with a call to the White House.
The numbers attached to the ASEAN agreement are concrete. The Canadian government estimates it could add nearly 2 billion Canadian dollars, about 1.4 billion American dollars, to the economy and create almost 14,000 jobs, mainly in agriculture and manufacturing. The Philippines agreement is expected to be signed next year, and Carney said it covers more than 90 percent of tariff lines. Those are real gains, but they are small next to the scale of trade with the United States, and no one in Ottawa pretends otherwise.
The two tracks reinforce each other. A Canada with more options in Asia can afford to be firmer in Washington, and a deal with Washington would take pressure off the exporters who need Asian markets least. Carney's trip is built on that logic: progress with Trump on one side, new agreements in Asia on the other, and a public line that Canada will sign only when the terms protect its industries. The test in the weeks ahead is whether the progress Carney described turns into a text, and whether the auto sector survives it intact.