The Globe and Mail’s second annual Intersect conference gets underway

This reads less like a policy announcement than a signal that Ottawa is building a pre-negotiation war room. The mix of labor, incumbent industrials, banks, and ex-politicians suggests the government is trying to pre-commit a domestic coalition before the USMCA review turns into sector-specific bargaining, which should reduce the odds of ad hoc concessions but also raises the bar for compromise. In market terms, that is mildly supportive for firms with cross-border exposure that can lobby for carve-outs, and mildly negative for names that depend on frictionless continental logistics or tariff-free inputs.

The second-order effect is that the winners are likely to be the most politically embedded capital-intensive operators rather than the most exposed exporters. Banks and rail can benefit if Ottawa responds with credit support, project finance, or infrastructure acceleration if talks get ugly; integrated infrastructure and regulated network assets tend to gain from policy-driven reshoring and redundancy spending. By contrast, contract manufacturers and commodity-sensitive industrials face a wider range of outcomes because even a small increase in border delays can compress working capital and inventory turns before it shows up in reported earnings.

The main risk is timing mismatch: the headlines can stay noisy for months, but equity dispersion usually only shows up when there is a concrete tariff, rules-of-origin, or procurement threat. If USMCA negotiations de-escalate, the current “defensive coalition” setup will fade quickly and politically favored Canadian cyclicals could mean-revert. The underappreciated catalyst is a broader Canadian industrial-policy response—any move toward subsidies, fast-track permitting, or domestic content rules would matter more for winners than the treaty review itself.