Canada is the United States's largest trading partner by most measures, with bilateral trade running at roughly $900 billion annually. For decades, the relationship was treated in Ottawa as a fixed axiom of Canadian economic life — deeply interdependent, occasionally contentious, but fundamentally stable. That assumption is now under review.
Two major polls released this month document a striking shift in Canadian public sentiment. A Nanos Research survey found that 85% of Canadians want to deepen economic ties with the European Union to reduce dependence on the US. A separate Research Co. poll put support for increased EU trade at 77% — with comparable levels of enthusiasm for expanded trade with the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia. Opposition to EU trade deepening registered at just 13%.
The numbers, compiled by CultMTL drawing on both Nanos and Research Co. data, represent an unusually strong public mandate for economic diversification. And they are arriving at a moment when Ottawa has both the political will and a structural vehicle — the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with the EU, provisionally in force since 2017 — to act on them.
Why now
The shift is not happening in a vacuum. Renewed US tariff threats, an unpredictable bilateral relationship under the current administration in Washington, and what Canadian business leaders describe as a new precariousness to supply chain arrangements that run through the US-Canada border have all sharpened the incentive to diversify.
For Canadian CFOs managing cross-border logistics, the calculation has changed materially. A supply chain routed entirely through the is now perceived as a concentration risk — a single-counterparty exposure to trade policy volatility. The alternative — routing more through European partners — involves higher upfront logistics costs but provides geopolitical hedging value that many boards are now willing to pay for.
