Mary Ng

Mary Ng spent years building Canada's trade relationships with Europe and the Pacific — CETA, CPTPP — when the prevailing political logic was that it was strategically smart but not urgent. Then the Trump administration's trade war made it urgent overnight. The infrastructure she helped build is now Canada's only viable alternative to the damage being done to Canada-US trade. She works on a portfolio that most Canadians ignore until there's a crisis, which is the mark of someone doing their job well. The crisis is now here and the groundwork was laid. That's what good long-term trade policy looks like even when it doesn't generate headlines.

Mary Ng has served as Canada's Minister of International Trade since 2019 and has been a consistent and substantive contributor to the federal cabinet's most consequential long-term project: reducing Canada's dangerous overdependence on a single trading partner. The combination of CETA implementation with the European Union and CPTPP ratification with eleven Pacific economies represents years of sustained work that has quietly expanded Canada's trade framework even as the domestic politics of trade attracted less attention than other files. The current trade war with the United States has made that work suddenly urgent rather than gradually strategic. The diversification that successive governments had pursued as a medium-term goal is now a short-term survival requirement for industries whose American market access has been disrupted by tariffs. The CETA and CPTPP frameworks — the scaffolding Ng and her predecessors built — are the only alternative demand available at anything approaching the scale of what Canadian exporters stand to lose from American market disruption. Ng has been unusually engaged with the small and medium business community in her portfolio — more than many trade ministers, who tend to focus on the large industrial exporters. SME access to trade financing, export development support, and market intelligence has been expanded, and the recognition that trade is not just a large-company phenomenon reflects a genuine understanding of the Canadian economy's structure. Her communication style is accessible without being superficial — she explains the complexity of trade without talking over the heads of her audience or pretending the decisions are simpler than they are.