Prime Minister Mark Carney touched down in Mexico City to regain Mexico’s trust and strategize with President Claudia Sheinbaum.
By Ian Austen
Sept. 20, 2025
This week, I joined Prime Minister Mark Carney on his whirlwind trip to Mexico City to meet the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum. We were in Mexico for only about 25 hours. But as I wrote with Emiliano Rodriguez Mega, my colleague who is based in Mexico City, Mr. Carney apparently succeeded in one of his key objectives: winning back Mexico’s trust while the two countries grapple with President Trump’s tariff chaos.
The two leaders came up with an “action plan” that Canadian officials said would actually involve action because of scheduled meetings between the two nations, defined objectives and a timetable.
The meeting with Ms. Sheinbaum reflected Mr. Carney’s current tack for handling Mr. Trump. As my colleague Matina Stevis-Gridneff wrote, “Mr. Carney is facing early signs of trouble as he discovers that being elected on an anti-Trump message does not mean you can govern on one, too.”
In Mexico, the two leaders’ plan called for increasing railway and ship port capacity, as well as developing “energy corridors” between the countries. The idea was to boost trade with each other as a partial replacement for sales lost to the United States and its tariff wall.
Before flying back to Ottawa on Friday afternoon, Mr. Carney underscored the rail part of the two-nation plan by visiting a railway terminal owned by the Canadian Pacific Kansas City Railway, whose headquarters are in Calgary.
After an awkward moment involving an abbreviation on one of the freshly painted rail cars that could be read as a vulgarity — aides arrived to cover up the offending letters — the prime minister; Diana Fox Carney, his wife; and two cabinet ministers inspected some bags bearing maple leafs that were filled with Canadian wheat as props for the visit. They then watched wheat being unloaded from CPKC hopper cars, the way it actually makes its way to Mexico from Canada.
Canadian Pacific’s merger with Kansas City Southern in 2023 not only greatly expanded its rail network in the United States, but it also extended the railway well into Mexico.
My colleague Peter Eavis wrote this week that CPKC is among the railways investing in their operations in the United States in a quest to become more competitive with trucking.
Peter also noted a major change that will come to railroads in the United States if a proposed merger between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern comes to pass. It would give the United States its first coast-to-coast railroad, something that Canadians have taken for granted more or less since the opening of Canadian Pacific in the 19th century.
The change is more than symbolic. Right now, moving freight from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coast in the United States by train involves changing rail lines in the Midwest. The receiving railroad usually gives priority to freight that originated on its line, sometimes leading to delays. And a merged railroad would mean that transcontinental shippers have to deal with only one company.
The creation of CPKC yielded fewer delays and other benefits for shippers moving goods between Canada and Mexico.
Barry Prentice, the director of the Transport Institute at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, told me that he didn’t see much room for improving shipping by rail between Canada and Mexico.
“The infrastructure is pretty much in place,” he said.
CPKC also recently opened a second bridge over the Texas-Mexico border, he said. That not only increased the railway’s capacity to haul freight, but sped up border inspections.
Then, Professor Prentice said, Canadian National, CPKC’s rival based in Montreal, has a deal with Ferromex, Mexico’s other major railway, to carry containers that start out on its tracks.
Canada and Mexico, he said, have limited ability to bring improvements to other forms of transportation without the participation and cooperation of the United States.
While the original North American Free Trade Agreement was supposed to allow Mexican trucks to roam the continent, that never happened, leading to inefficiencies.
Mexico has been upgrading its ports. And in Canada, a new container port in Montreal is among the first five major infrastructure projects Mr. Carney’s government has fast-tracked as being in the new national interest.
But Professor Prentice said that an efficient and effective north-south shipping corridor would require the United States to drop a longstanding ban on foreign ships’ picking up cargo in one U.S. port and dropping it off at another U.S. port. (The same restriction also applies to airline passengers and air freight.)
“It would be impossible to operate a Canadian or Mexican ship, say a container ship, that would be picking up and dropping off cargo all the way along the North American coast,” he said.
Professor Prentice, however, does have one transportation idea that neither Ms. Sheinbaum nor Mr. Carney — really no one in either government — is promoting, at least publicly.
“If we want to get creative, Canada and Mexico should each build giant cargo airship hangars and support the development of cargo airships that can expand our trade in perishable food products,” he said. “My research shows that a cargo airship the size of the zeppelins could compete with tractor-trailers.”
The creation of CPKC yielded fewer delays and other benefits for shippers moving goods between Canada and Mexico.
Barry Prentice, the director of the Transport Institute at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, told me that he didn’t see much room for improving shipping by rail between Canada and Mexico.
“The infrastructure is pretty much in place,” he said.
CPKC also recently opened a second bridge over the Texas-Mexico border, he said. That not only increased the railway’s capacity to haul freight, but sped up border inspections.
Then, Professor Prentice said, Canadian National, CPKC’s rival based in Montreal, has a deal with Ferromex, Mexico’s other major railway, to carry containers that start out on its tracks.
Canada and Mexico, he said, have limited ability to bring improvements to other forms of transportation without the participation and cooperation of the United States.
While the original North American Free Trade Agreement was supposed to allow Mexican trucks to roam the continent, that never happened, leading to inefficiencies.
Mexico has been upgrading its ports. And in Canada, a new container port in Montreal is among the first five major infrastructure projects Mr. Carney’s government has fast-tracked as being in the new national interest.
But Professor Prentice said that an efficient and effective north-south shipping corridor would require the United States to drop a longstanding ban on foreign ships’ picking up cargo in one U.S. port and dropping it off at another U.S. port. (The same restriction also applies to airline passengers and air freight.)
“It would be impossible to operate a Canadian or Mexican ship, say a container ship, that would be picking up and dropping off cargo all the way along the North American coast,” he said.
Professor Prentice, however, does have one transportation idea that neither Ms. Sheinbaum nor Mr. Carney — really no one in either government — is promoting, at least publicly.
“If we want to get creative, Canada and Mexico should each build giant cargo airship hangars and support the development of cargo airships that can expand our trade in perishable food products,” he said. “My research shows that a cargo airship the size of the zeppelins could compete with tractor-trailers.”
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