Canada says free trade negotiations with ASEAN and the Philippines are more than 90 per cent complete, with India close behind and all three targeted for conclusion before the end of the year. The trade minister insists none of it is about Donald Trump
MANILA, September 24, 2026. Canada’s Minister of International Trade told Reuters this week that two separate free trade negotiations, one bilateral with the Philippines and one regional with the eleven-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, are “more than 90% complete,” and that Ottawa is pushing to have both ready by the time Prime Minister Mark Carney arrives in Manila in November for the ASEAN Summit.
“There’s energy from both sides to get a deal done, and that’s the most important part,” Maninder Sidhu said on the sidelines of the 15th ASEAN Economic Ministers-Canada Consultation on September 22.
Then he made the claim that will be tested hardest. Asked whether the Southeast Asian push was a response to American trade policy, Sidhu said it was not about any single country. “Plan A was always diversification, regardless of what happens with our partners.”
It is a striking assertion from the trade minister of a government that has, in the same month, imposed surtaxes of 15, 25 and 50 per cent on more than 600 American tariff lines covering C$27.6 billion in trade, suspended negotiations with Washington, and watched its prime minister decline a meeting with the American president at the United Nations. Ottawa’s position is that the diversification agenda predates the rupture. The calendar suggests, at minimum, acceleration.
What was actually agreed in Manila
The ministerial consultation on September 22 produced language describing the ASEAN-Canada Free Trade Agreement negotiations as having “reached an important stage” and being “on track for substantive conclusion in 2026.” Ministers reaffirmed commitment to a “high-quality, comprehensive, and mutually beneficial Agreement as soon as possible in 2026.”
Global Affairs Canada’s wrap-up release on September 23 added two new deliverables. Canada committed $2 million, delivered in partnership with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, to combat organized criminal activity targeting critical mineral supply chains. A further $280,000 goes through the ASEAN-Canada Plan of Action Trust Fund for micro, small and medium enterprise development and economic diplomacy training across Southeast Asia. Sidhu met on the margins with the ASEAN Secretary-General and with representatives of Brunei, Cambodia, Singapore and the United Kingdom.
His quote in the release ties the regional work to the government’s headline economic target.
“At the ASEAN Economic Ministers’ Meeting, we have advanced our negotiations towards Free Trade Agreements with ASEAN and the Philippines,” Sidhu said. “Agreements with both will expand opportunities for our exporters in this key region and create more well-paying jobs at home. Securing greater access to these key markets is how we will double our non-U.S. exports over the next decade. That is $300 billion in more trade and new orders for Canadian resources, industries, and talent, to build a more diversified, resilient economy.”
On the Philippine side, Trade Undersecretary and chief negotiator Allan Gepty told reporters on September 21 that the parties are “almost close,” with only “very few remaining issues” left to handle through smaller meetings and online exchanges. No further full negotiating round is planned. The fourth and final full round took place in Toronto from September 8 to 11.
Gepty was candid about where the friction is. “It’s very common in the market access, especially when you talk about sensitive products like agricultural products,” he said. “That is quite understandable.”
The India leg
The Manila stop was the second half of a trip that began in Mumbai. Sidhu met Indian Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on September 18 and 19, alongside both countries’ chief negotiators, and Global Affairs Canada issued a release on September 21 describing progress on a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement.
Four rounds of CEPA negotiations are now complete, the fourth having run in New Delhi from September 14 to 18. Officials will continue engaging to narrow remaining gaps, with a shared objective of concluding by the end of 2026. Sidhu will lead a Team Canada trade mission to India in October.
“My discussions with Minister Goyal this week are driving real progress toward an agreement that will double our two-way trade to $70 billion by 2030,” Sidhu said. “India’s rapid growth and Canada’s advantage in energy, critical minerals, aerospace, AI and more mean enormous potential for our businesses and workers.”
His framing of the combined effect, from a September 17 travel advisory and repeated widely in Philippine coverage, is the most quotable line of the trip: “We already have preferential access to a market of 1.5 billion consumers, and by concluding agreements with these partners, we will double that reach to 3 billion.”
The India file has harder edges than the ASEAN one. Reporting by The Logic indicates India is pressing for tariff-rate quotas on crops and for recognition of its economic weight in the agreement’s architecture. India’s high duties on pulses, particularly lentils and dry peas, have been a standing Canadian grievance for years, and Saskatchewan carries most of the exposure. The fourth round covered goods, services, rules of origin and technical barriers to trade, with pharmaceuticals, textiles, engineering goods and agriculture all in play.
Sidhu’s Mumbai business programme, meeting Mahindra and Mahindra, Bajaj Integrated Health System, JSW Group and CAE, signalled the sectors Ottawa is prioritizing: life sciences, clean technology and energy transition, and aerospace.
The numbers behind the pitch
Canada-ASEAN two-way merchandise trade reached $52.5 billion in 2025, up 23.7 per cent from $42.4 billion in 2024. Canadian merchandise imports from the bloc have doubled since 2020, rising 100.1 per cent. ASEAN, with roughly 700 million people and a combined GDP above US$5 trillion, is Canada’s fourth-largest trading partner. Canada became a dialogue partner in 1977 and will mark the fiftieth anniversary of that relationship in 2027. Negotiations for the regional agreement were launched at the tenth ministerial consultation in November 2021.
The Prime Minister’s Office projected in July that a Canada-ASEAN agreement would add nearly $2 billion to Canadian GDP and create close to 14,000 Canadian jobs, with gains in agriculture and manufacturing.
The Philippine bilateral is smaller but growing in an uneven way. Two-way merchandise trade was $3.4 billion in 2025, up from $3.2 billion. Canadian exports fell to $1.1 billion from $1.4 billion, while imports rose to $2.3 billion from $1.8 billion. Ottawa’s projection is that the agreement would triple bilateral trade by 2035, with gains concentrated in agriculture and forest products. From Manila’s side, Canada was the Philippines’ eighteenth-largest export market in 2025 at $1.31 billion, or 1.5 per cent of Philippine exports, and its sixteenth-largest trading partner overall. The deal would be the Philippines’ first bilateral free trade agreement with a North American country. The Philippines holds the ASEAN chair for 2026.
India is the largest prize and the most complicated. Two-way goods and services trade was $30.4 billion in 2025, of which merchandise trade was $13.6 billion. Canadian merchandise exports to India were $3.9 billion, led by vegetables, mineral fuels and oils, and wood pulp. Imports were $9.7 billion, led by precious stones and metals, machinery and pharmaceuticals. Services tell a different story: Canadian services exports to India were $15.2 billion, flat year over year, with education-related travel the dominant component at 6.3 per cent of Canada’s total service exports. Service imports from India were $4.5 billion, up 3 per cent.
The overarching target is Carney’s commitment to double Canada’s non-United States exports over a decade, from roughly $300 billion to roughly $600 billion. Non-American trade reached $296 billion in 2025, against $195 billion seven years earlier, a run that met the previous government’s 2018 goal of a 50 per cent increase by 2025. Ottawa reports non-American goods exports up roughly 36 per cent since 2024 and non-American goods and services exports up $33 billion in 2025 against 2024.
The LNG pitch, and the critique it invites
Sidhu’s specific commercial offer in Manila was energy. Canada has more than five liquefied natural gas projects at various stages of development on its Pacific coast, all oriented toward Asian markets, and he framed them against Southeast Asian supply anxiety created by disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
“Canada can play a key role to stabilize those energy prices and reinforce those supply lines,” he said.
He also pointed to committed Canadian funding for the Luzon Economic Corridor and to opportunities in Philippine energy, data centres and artificial intelligence infrastructure. He declined to estimate how much investment an agreement would generate, saying trade deals typically signal government support in a way that encourages companies to move on their own.
That pitch lands directly on the sharpest critique of the diversification target.
Carlo Dade, director of international policy at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, has argued that the $600 billion goal can be met without diversifying anything structurally. “If you want to double exports by volume, that’s a different question,” he told The Globe and Mail. “But if you want to double exports by value, you look at the big honking thing that you export by value, and if you simply move more of that, you’ve diversified trade.”
Dade’s view is that the practical key to diversification is another oil pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast, a project Alberta favours and British Columbia resists. Sidhu’s own Manila pitch, leading with LNG, illustrates the point in real time: the fastest route to the target runs through commodity volume, not through the manufactured and value-added exports the strategy is nominally meant to build.
There is history behind the scepticism. Statistics Canada analysis cited by The Globe and Mail found gold accounted for close to 30 per cent of the increase in Canada’s non-American exports between 2015 and 2024, most of it destined for the United Kingdom. Bank of Montreal chief economist Doug Porter has noted that gold and silver exports combined now roughly match car and light-truck exports at about $58 billion.
Travel services distorted the picture further. Canadian travel exports rose 136 per cent to $61.3 billion between 2015 and 2023, with India alone accounting for 35 per cent of that increase as travel exports to India climbed from $984 million to $13.5 billion. Canada’s temporary resident population more than doubled to 3.1 million between 2021 and 2024. Ottawa has since capped student and temporary foreign worker permits, removing that engine from the forecast.
Marc-Andre Roy, co-chief executive and managing partner at CPCS Transcom, has questioned whether the supply-side response is even the binding constraint. “I don’t think just building more infrastructure is going to unleash a wave of new trade,” he said. “It’s got to be products that the world wants, first of all, and getting that stuff to market competitively.”
The infrastructure gap is nonetheless real. The Association of Canadian Port Authorities has told Ottawa in its pre-budget submission that Canadian ports face at least $10 billion in infrastructure needs, only 40 per cent of it with confirmed funding, and that the figure could rise to $21 billion through 2040. Ottawa’s answer is a $5 billion Trade Diversification Corridor Fund and a new Major Projects Office, whose first tranche includes the Contrecoeur container terminal expansion near Montreal and expansion of the Kitimat LNG terminal in British Columbia. The latter is directly relevant to what Sidhu was selling in Manila.
The underlying structural problem, as The Globe and Mail framed it, is that Canada already has fifteen free trade agreements, including the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with the European Union. Trade agreements do not generate trade if companies do not use them.
The precedent that makes the deadline credible
The reason to take the end-of-2026 target seriously is Indonesia.
Carney announced the Canada-Indonesia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement on September 24, 2025, Canada’s first bilateral trade agreement with an ASEAN member. It was signed on September 30, 2025, and its entry into force was fixed by order published in the Canada Gazette, Part II, on July 1, 2026, with the Indonesian side targeting implementation by late 2026.
The commercial substance was meaningful. Indonesia was Canada’s sixth-largest global agri-food and seafood export market in 2024, and the largest in ASEAN, at $1.2 billion. The average tariff on Canadian agri-food entering Indonesia before the agreement was 8.6 per cent. On implementation, more than 95 per cent of current Canadian exports see tariffs reduced or eliminated, covering wheat, potash, wood, soybeans and canola. Modelling by the Office of the Chief Economist put the effect at $226 million in additional Canadian GDP and $1.5 billion in bilateral trade expansion. Canada secured expanded market access for Canadian meat products to Indonesia in February 2026.
The Indonesia timeline is also the cautionary note. From announcement in September 2025 to entry into force took nine months, and Indonesian implementation is still pending. Substantive conclusion is not signature, and signature is not ratification. Three agreements committed to substantive conclusion by December 31 would still be years from delivering tariff relief at the border.
Where the deals get hard
Agriculture is the common obstacle across all three negotiations, and it is the file where Canada’s own defensive interests are least flexible.
Gepty has conceded that market access on sensitive agricultural products is the outstanding Philippine issue. India wants tariff-rate quotas on crops while maintaining the pulse duties that Canadian growers most want removed. And Canada carries its own protected sector in dairy, poultry and eggs under supply management, which is simultaneously the central irritant in the American relationship.
The Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance, which represents beef, pork, wheat, grains, oilseeds, canola, sugar, malt, pulses and processed food exporters, has argued in its ASEAN submissions that Australia and New Zealand already hold preferential access to the Philippine market that Canadian exporters do not. That competitive gap is the strongest commercial argument for moving quickly, and it is also the reason Canadian negotiators have limited leverage to hold out on the agricultural chapters.
There is a security dimension bundled into the commercial one. The $2 million critical minerals initiative with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, alongside the Status of Visiting Forces Agreement and Mutual Logistics Support Arrangement with the Philippines, indicates Ottawa is selling economic security rather than tariff lines alone. That approach parallels the critical minerals track running toward the Canada-European Union summit in Montreal on October 29 and 30.
What Canadian businesses should take from this
For exporters, the practical horizon is longer than the headlines suggest. Even on the most optimistic schedule, substantive conclusion by December would be followed by legal scrubbing, translation, signature, and domestic ratification in eleven ASEAN capitals plus Ottawa. Firms should be treating these agreements as a 2028 or 2029 market-access event, not a 2027 one.
What is actionable now is preparation. Rules of origin in the Indonesian agreement offer the best available template for what the ASEAN regional text is likely to contain. Exporters in agri-food, forest products, aerospace, clean technology and life sciences should be qualifying product against those rules and building distributor relationships in advance of tariff relief rather than after it. The Team Canada mission to India in October is the nearest practical entry point.
For importers, the direction of travel is toward lower duties on Southeast Asian and Indian inputs, which matters for firms currently paying Canadian surtaxes on American equivalents. Reshoring analysis that assumed a North American supply base should be revisited against a landscape where Asian inputs may become duty-free while American ones carry 25 or 50 per cent.
The strategic question Sidhu declined to answer directly remains open. Ottawa says diversification was always Plan A. The evidence of the past eight weeks is that Plan A is now being executed on a timeline set by Plan B’s failure. Both things can be true, and for Canadian exporters weighing where to put the next five years of effort, which one is true matters less than the fact that the deals are close.
Carney arrives in Manila in November. Modi arrives in Canada in mid-December to sign the CEPA, according to Sidhu’s confirmation this week. Those two dates will settle whether “more than 90 per cent complete” was a negotiating position or a forecast.