Good morning. We’re less than six weeks away from the formal review date for the North American trade agreement (choose your acronym: USMCA, CUSMA or T-MEC). Talks between Washington and Mexico City are moving forward. Talks between Washington and Ottawa: not so much. In focus today we look at the state-of-play, what each side wants, and how things might play out in the coming weeks and months.

Pipelines: Prime Minister Mark Carney insists his government’s climate plans will stand the test of time and shifting energy needs.

Markets: A spinoff of Nasdaq is suing its Canadian rival for alleged patent infringement, threatening to derail the growth of Vancouver-based Hiive, a stock exchange for private companies.

Housing: According to data from Equifax Canada, mortgage delinquencies in Ontario and B.C. climbed sharply in the first quarter.

I’m Mark Rendell, The Globe’s economics reporter. Like most trade nerds, I have July 1, 2026, circled on my calendar in bold red ink.

That’s the day Ottawa, Washington and Mexico City are supposed to sit down and decide what to do about the USMCA, the rulebook for continental trade. They can agree to renew the treaty for 16 years, or move to a period of annual reviews for 10 years, after which the agreement expires if no extension is reached. They can also withdraw from the agreement with six-months notice.

There’s a lot that we don’t know about how this will play out. (Anyone wanna bet what Donald Trump posts on Truth Social at 2:15 a.m. on July 1?) But here’s how I’m looking at things.

The timeline: No one thinks July 1 is a finish line. Officials from all three countries have said they expect to continue negotiating past that date. Technically that means we move into the 10-year period of annual reviews.

The treaty will remain in force, and an extension agreement could be struck at any time after July 1. There are political reasons this could happen ahead of the U.S. mid-terms in November. But Mexico’s Minister of Economy Marcelo Ebrard warned this month that we could be stuck with yearly reviews going forward.

The state-of-play: United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Washington’s top trade official, is heading to Mexico City this week for the first formal round of USMCA review talks. Canada is notably not at the table.

You could read this several ways. Mexico City and Washington have more complicated issues to work through, given U.S. concerns about factory jobs being lost to Mexico and Chinese parts in Mexican supply chains. But it’s also true that the two countries are getting along much better than Canada and the U.S.

“What we’ve heard from USTR is we want to work on 90 per cent of the issues that we have with Mexico, and the remaining 10 per cent, let Canada know whenever they are invited back to the table, if they want be at the table,” Pedro Casas Alatriste, CEO of the American Chamber of Commerce of Mexico, told me last week, referring to the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

What each side wants: Team Trump wants to rejig the agreement to bring more factory jobs back to the U.S. and reduce imported Chinese parts in key manufacturing industries. In practice, that means tighter regional content rules and more alignment from Mexico and Canada on external tariffs. It also sees the review as an opportunity to browbeat Ottawa and Mexico City into making various concessions. For Canada, it wants to see changes to online streaming rules, provincial alcohol bans and how dairy quotas are allocated, among other policy tweaks.

For Canada and Mexico, the key goal is the same: getting the U.S. to ease its devastating sectoral tariffs on autos, steel, aluminum, copper and wood products (known as Section 232 tariffs). Most trade experts I speak with don’t think Sec. 232 tariffs are going away entirely. The more realistic aim, they say, is lower sectoral tariffs and perhaps a quota system.

Goodbye Free Trade. Hello Managed Trade.

What industries are being discussed: Auto industry reps have told me they expect the U.S. to demand higher North American and U.S.-specific content requirements for vehicles – familiar demands from the 2017-2019 USMCA negotiations.

Greer has also said he’ll push for tighter rule of origins for a number of industries beyond the auto sector. If you want a cheat sheet, look at the sectors the U.S. has targeted for Sec. 232 national security investigations: steel, aluminum, semiconductors, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, critical minerals, etc.

How will it play out? This is the $2-trillion question. Greer has suggested he doesn’t want to blow up the trilateral deal. Negotiating separate treaties with Canada and Mexico would be a mountain of work for his overstretched department, and require the Trump administration to go back to Congress to seek formal trade promotion authority. That’s something it wants to avoid.

Instead, Greer has said he wants to layer bilateral deals over the “pillars” of the USMCA. What that likely means in practice: separate “reciprocal trade agreements” with Mexico City and Ottawa that adjust the Sec. 232 tariffs in return for various concessions.

The big political risk for Ottawa is that Washington strikes one of these deals with Mexico City in the coming months as a reward for playing nice, and leaves Canada out in the cold.

Ottawa’s positioning: Mark Carney has spent much of the past year warning that closer economic ties with the U.S. are a bad idea. But he’s begun to change his tune in recent weeks, saying that Canada “remains open to deeper integration” with the United States in certain sectors, “including options for Fortress North America.”

In short, he’s sending different signals to Washington, to Canadians and to capitals around the world. I wrote about this high-wire act – and much more – in a recent analysis for the Report on Business.

What’s next: Greer has to report to Congress on June 1 (next Monday) laying out the U.S. plan for the USMCA review. Watch that space!