Trade ministers from some of the world’s largest economies gathered in Milwaukee on Wednesday for a Group of 20 meeting dominated by President Trump’s tariff agenda, with several American trading partners using the sidelines to plan around their host.
Canada arrived promoting its diversification strategy. “In a more unpredictable world, trade diversification is Canada’s Plan A,” Maninder Sidhu, the international trade minister and head of the Canadian delegation, said in an email responding to questions from CBC News. Canada’s trade with countries other than the United States has grown 17 percent, or $33 billion, in the past year, he said, and nearly one-third of Canadian exports now go to destinations outside the United States, the highest share in 40 years.
Mr. Sidhu has meetings planned with the delegations from the European Union and India. “We are moving at pace to secure greater access to some of the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies,” he said. He is expected to cross paths with Jamieson Greer, the United States trade representative, but the summit is not expected to revive Canada-U.S. trade talks, which broke down in August after Canada rejected the latest American offer. Mr. Greer and Dominic LeBlanc, the Canada-U.S. trade minister, both say they have spoken by phone multiple times a week since, including as recently as Friday.
The latest American measure against Canada landed on Tuesday, when an import ban on certain Canadian products, including most alcoholic drinks, took effect.
Over two days of meetings, the United States will push its own priorities: eliminating forced labor in global supply chains and addressing “structural and excess capacity and production,” with a session dedicated to steel, according to a news release from the trade representative’s office. A U.S. trade court this week separately heard a challenge to the legal basis of Mr. Trump’s global tariffs.
The issue that stands out most, said Martha Harrison, a Toronto-based trade lawyer who co-leads the international trade and investment team at McCarthy Tétrault, is the American push to change the World Trade Organization’s most-favored-nation rules, which require members to treat one another equally. “It has to be the same tariff rate across the board,” Ms. Harrison told CBC News. “It is not dramatic to say that if the MFN rule is softened … it will create distinctions and a trade environment globally that is even more unpredictable than it is now.”
Mr. Greer laid out the case for reform in an opinion essay published by The New York Times in August 2025, writing that global manufacturing had shifted to places “where companies could exploit vulnerable workers or benefit from expansive state support.” “The rules of international trade cannot be a suicide pact,” he wrote, saying the United States had “laid the foundation for a new global trading order.” Ms. Harrison said Washington’s position is that the rule “was designed for a world where countries broadly played by similar rules,” while some members pursue state-led industrial policies.
Changing the rule would mean more uncertainty for businesses that rely on international supply chains, Ms. Harrison said. “It impacts, ultimately, not just the trading relationship between Canada and the U.S., but trading relationships around the world that are governed by the rules based system,” she said.
The WTO, a consensus-based body whose 166 members are at different stages of development and often have conflicting interests, has long struggled to agree on reforms. On Sept. 15, it urged members to rewrite global trade rules or risk a slide into fragmentation that could significantly reduce economic output and hit poorer countries hardest. In its annual report, the organization said existing rules had failed to keep pace with shifts in economic power, the rise of industrial policy, digital trade and escalating political tensions between major powers.