The free trade protesters finding hope in CUSMA limbo

This year, as Canadians gather to celebrate Canada Day, the country’s lead trade negotiators, along with Mexican and U.S. representatives, will all be peering into their computer screens and discussing the next phase of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA). 

Mexico and Canada have both said they want to renew the backbone treaty of free trade in North America. The United States, on the other hand, is expected to formally begin a withdrawal from the agreement, despite the fact that CUSMA was a deal of the U.S. President Donald Trump’s own design. 

Longtime observers of trade in North America view this partly as an attempt by Trump to gain leverage over Prime Minister Mark Carney and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo. But since Mexico and the U.S. have already scheduled a third round of negotiations for July 20, in Mexico City, it is likely that negotiators will simply be drawn into a period of extended negotiations. 

“I don’t think a withdrawal makes much economic sense. It would be highly disastrous for all three economies, including the United States,” wrote Diego Marroquín Bitar in an e-mail to rabble.ca. 

Bitar is a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an expert on CUSMA. He believes, “the most realistic outcome is that the three ministers acknowledge the progress made so far – particularly on issues like economic security, labor, and agriculture – and announce that negotiations will continue, likely with additional rounds over the coming months.”

Before signing CUSMA, Donald Trump had routinely called its predecessor, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) the “worst trade deal ever made.” He then proceeded to renegotiate th´ trilateral trade pact into an updated version of the same agreement, including one new key item: an automatic expiration date, the infamous “sunset clause” which is what forced the three countries back into this mandatory review. 

But even if a wholesale abandonment of CUSMA is doubtful, and an indeterminate period of trade limbo descends upon North America, a group of “fair trade” activists has, paradoxically, found a measure of hope in jeopardy and an opportunity to continue advancing a fair-trade agenda. 

The Fair Trade activists and their case against CUSMA 

Throughout the month of May and June, transnational activists staged coordinated demonstrations in Blaine (WA), Surrey (BC), Brooklyn (NY), Detroit (MI), San Francisco (CA) Montreal (QC) El Paso (TX), Juárez (CH), Buffalo (NY), Fort Erie (ON), San Diego (CA) and Mexico City (CDMX), all to protest the terms of the CUSMA review.

In some cities, the demonstrations were well-attended, in other places, less so. But the activists who gathered under the banner of “Days of Solidarity” found a collective channel to voice many of the progressive left’s longstanding objections to free trade. 

According to Tania Del Moral, the Washington Advocacy Coordinator for the fair-trade advocacy group Global Exchange, “Days of Solidarity” had started in November 2025, when Global Exchange began to gather a coalition of civil society groups like The Trade Justice Education Fund, Public Citizen, Asamblea de Incidencia frente al T-MEC and The Trade Justice Network among others, and sent a delegation to Washington D.C. to meet with members of Congress, the Department of Labour, as well as major unions like the United Auto Workers, and the AFL-CIO. 

“We basically thought that having a statement that is cross-cutting would make our point even more clear that citizens across the three countries are united in making these demands,” said Del Moral. 

The coalition ultimately drafted a tri-lateral statement to send to each country’s trade representatives, and had 160 organizations sign-on from across the three nations. The letter calls for “strengthening rural communities, improving conditions for workers, taking environmental crises, afro-descendant, and indigenous rights seriously, removing giveaways to big tech and tackling gun violence.

While the letters that were sent to Canada’s and the U.S’s trade representatives, at least, received nothing more than an automatic reply, the advocacy work still reinvigorated an enduring political stance on the left.  

In the past, various progressive groups, including public unions and civil coalitions have accused NAFTA and CUSMA of continuously eroding workers’ rights and fair wages, contributing to accelerated environmental destruction, ignoring indigenous rights, and even shortening our overall life spans. 

Unlike economic nationalists, in the style of Trump and the MAGA base, who criticize free trade in favour of economic protectionism, loose progressive coalitions of fair-trade activists have accused free-trade deals of advancing the interests of corporations over the well-being of citizens. These criticisms go back more than three decades to before the creation of NAFTA itself, and many of these disparate grievances – workers’ rights, environmental protection, and democratic sovereignty – were galvanized in 1999, during the Seattle WTO protests –  the “Battle of Seattle.” 

More recently, the progressive anti-free-trade protestors have also decried each government’s big tech favouritism in the form of AI data centers, the inability to curb gun violence, and support of an investor-state dispute settlement framework – CUSMA’s 14th Chapter –  which still applies to Mexico, and is often-thought to unjustly favour American companies’ interests over the rights of local communities.   

Florencia Dolorosa, an activist from El Paso, Texas, who requested that her name be changed in this article to protect her identity, saw it this way: “Look, if [CUSMA dies] like it should in July, we’ll have an annual review every year. We will tell them what’s up. So let’s get the annual review going. Kill this s**t. [CUSMA] doesn’t belong here. It never should have. We already did the equation.” 

Dolorosa believes that if any of the three countries fail to renew CUSMA, an opportunity would arise every year for the next decade to protest free trade. To her, activism is a vital step toward fair trade.

By contrast, in Canada, “it’s much harder to mobilize people,” said Claude Vaillancourt, Président of the Action citoyenne pour la justice fiscale, sociale et écologique (ATTAC), who represents the Montreal chapter of “Days of Solidarity.” Vaillancourt said the protest in Montreal was reasonably well attended, but he admitted the movement against CUSMA faces challenges because free trade is so entrenched in Canada. 

“Because free trade is more recognized as a necessity. We are so afraid of losing our ties with the United States, of being imposed tariffs, that I feel like we are ready to accept anything,” he said.  “So it is extremely worrying for us to see how a government like ours will negotiate this, especially since it has not been very reliable so far.”

Hillary Haden, the organizing director of the Trade Justice Education Fund saw the strategy differently and said she’s optimistic that even just delaying the CUSMA negotiations as much as possible could benefit the progressive cause, and eventually lead to change. 

“I think there’s really a lot of opportunity that lies in finding a way to slow the negotiation until there’s a new Congress, which will be next year, or ideally a change in the administration… But it’s not good for any of us to rush into locking in these existing bad rules.” 

Another thing Haden said was that she understood Prime Minister Carney’s approach to encouraging countries to join together against Trump’s bullying. 

“I think the solutions to that bullying are really important. And it basically seems like [Carney’s] counter to this approach is just to push the European Union to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And that’s a strategy, right? And a trade deal that is going to keep putting corporate interests ahead of working people’s interests in Canada and around the world. And I think that’s the sort of solution that progressives have been fighting for decades,” said Haden.

Although none of the The Days of Solidarity open letters have received a direct reply from any of the three governments, the Canadian trade minister Dominic LeBlanc’s office wrote in a statement to rabble.ca, that the Canadian government has, in fact, been consulting Canadian workers, farmers and businesses since 2024. 

“These consultations, which have included the receipt of well over 5,000 submissions from Canadian businesses, industry associations, councils, labour unions, Indigenous groups. Provinces, territories and other groups, have helped give those with a vested interest a voice,” the statement said. 

Meantime, the activist from El Paso, Florencia Dolorosa, gave her own stern warning to Canadians about the harms that free-trade deals can bring over time. She said she has watched her community around El Paso and Juárez deteriorate over her lifetime, and she attributes that damage to the cost of free trade. 

“Unless we know what our consumption is costing, we’re never paying the full price, she said, “and those people, us here on the border, us south of the border, that’s where the price is being paid. On our livelihood. But it’s coming for you,” she continued, referring to Canada. “So if empathy doesn’t get you, and solidarity doesn’t either, then reality will.”

The post The free trade protesters finding hope in CUSMA limbo appeared first on rabble.ca.

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