Note from George:
Folks, the headlines this year have been genuinely impressive. Billions with Saudi Arabia. Billions with India. A pact with the UAE. A partnership with Indonesia. Every one of them lands with a big number attached, and it’s easy to look at that string of announcements and conclude Carney’s diversification push - his stated goal of pulling Canada’s economy away from overreliance on the US - is actually bearing fruit. That’s the story the headlines tell. Let’s find out if it’s the story the facts back up.
Not so fast. Nearly every one of those announcements is an MOU - a memorandum of understanding, not a finished deal. So let’s take a deep dive and find out what these things actually are, and whether they’re as far along as the headlines make them sound.
PM CARNEY SIGNS A LOT OF MOUS. HOW MANY, AND HOW MUCH?
Since taking office, Mark Carney’s government has signed at least 13 commercial agreements and MOUs with Saudi Arabia in a single July visit (worth over $1 billion), five MOUs with India in March (worth $5.5 billion), a foreign investment pact with the UAE (tied to a pledged $70 billion), a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement with Indonesia, provincial MOUs with British Columbia and Alberta, and agreements with the Philippines - among others.
Add up just the headline dollar figures on the deals above and you’re already past $76 billion in announced value. That’s not a complete tally - nobody, including us, has found a single verified master list of every MOU this government has signed, because governments and journalists use “MOU,” “framework,” “partnership,” and “agreement” loosely and interchangeably. But it’s enough to make one thing clear: the dollar signs are real, frequent, and add up fast in a headline.
Here’s the question none of those headlines answer: how many of those billions have actually become anything?
WHAT IS AN MOU, ACTUALLY?
An MOU - memorandum of understanding - is not a contract. It’s a written statement that two parties intend to work toward something, without legally binding either side to deliver it. The US Department of Health and Human Services puts the distinction as plainly as anyone: an MOU is “a formalized statement of the mutual expectations of two agencies” and is “not legally binding,” while a contract is “a private law between two parties which can be upheld in court.” One documents a handshake. The other can get you sued if you break it.
That’s not a knock on MOUs by definition - they’re a completely normal, useful step in any negotiation, government or business. The problem is when the public treats an MOU announcement like the deal is already done.
SO ARE THEY SMOKE AND MIRRORS?
Not entirely - but the gap between “announced” and “real” is bigger and slower than most headlines let on, and this isn’t new to Carney. It’s a pattern that runs straight through the Trudeau years too.
The clearest industry-wide data point comes from trade policy specifically, not opinion: the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that since 2006, the average time between a trade agreement being signed and actually taking effect has run almost 50 months - just over four years. And that’s measuring from signature, which is already a more advanced stage than an MOU. Most of what’s been announced this year hasn’t reached signature yet, let alone force.
THE TRUDEAU YARDSTICK
This is worth sitting with, because it means Carney didn’t invent the announcement-heavy playbook - he inherited a well-worn one.
In September 2016, Justin Trudeau’s government announced 56 deals with China worth more than $1.2 billion, signed during a trade delegation to Shanghai. Canada never did sign a free trade agreement with China - the relationship deteriorated instead, especially after the 2018 arrest of Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou. Whatever became of those 56 headline deals individually was never tracked publicly the way the initial announcement was covered.
In 2016, Trudeau also signed the Canada-EU free trade agreement (CETA) - a genuine, ratified achievement, and a useful reminder that not everything in this category is vapor. But even CETA, arguably Trudeau’s most concrete trade win, took years of negotiation and nearly collapsed over objections from Belgium’s French-speaking Wallonia region before it closed. Real deals, even successful ones, move slowly and aren’t guaranteed until they’re actually signed.
Closer to home, and easier to measure: Build Canada, an independent tracker, monitors the Trudeau-era Canadian Free Trade Agreement’s promise to eliminate barriers to trade between provinces. Its verdict as of this year: only 31 percent of those pledges have actually been implemented, years after the deal was signed. That’s not a hostile partisan attack - it’s a neutral tracker’s plain accounting of a promise that’s less than a third delivered, long after the announcement faded from the news cycle.
So the honest historical baseline, across governments: announcements move fast, and headlines love a dollar figure. Delivery moves slowly, unevenly, and often quietly enough that nobody circles back to check.
THE ONE CLEAR WIN SO FAR
To be fair to the current government: the $2.6 billion Cameco-India uranium supply deal, running 2027 to 2035, is a real, signed, binding contract - not just an MOU - and it converted fast, announced and finalized essentially together. It’s proof this can work quickly when the two sides are ready to commit, not just talk.
WHAT THE CRITICS AND DEFENDERS ACTUALLY SAY
This isn’t just a numbers argument. Real people with real expertise have weighed in on both sides - and it’s worth noting upfront that Carney himself has not offered a direct public defence of why his government leans so heavily on MOUs specifically. What follows is what others, on both sides, have said instead.
The sharpest specific critique comes from the Fraser Institute, which took the actual Canada-Alberta pipeline MOU and read it line by line. Their verdict: the document contradicts itself within consecutive sentences - one line states the bitumen pipeline is “a prerequisite” to the Pathways carbon-capture project, and the next line states Pathways is “also a prerequisite” to the pipeline. Circular logic, in a legal document. Their conclusion after four readings: “only governments could write an MOU that no Canadian could understand.”
A more structural critique comes from outside traditional media entirely - a Saskatchewan-based political commentator who has argued MOUs function as “diplomatic participation trophies,” writing: “There is a specific reason politicians love them. A formal treaty often triggers a debate in the House of Commons. An MOU does not. It allows the Prime Minister to bypass Parliament entirely. This creates a big headline without the risk of a messy vote.” That’s a real structural point worth taking seriously regardless of what you think of the source: MOUs don’t just move slower than contracts, they also avoid the parliamentary scrutiny a formal treaty would require.
On the other side, the reaction to the Alberta MOU specifically pulled support from unexpected corners. Jason Kenney, a former Conservative Alberta premier and Harper-government cabinet minister, called it a “historic agreement” and congratulated both Carney and Premier Danielle Smith. Steven Guilbeault, Carney’s own former environment minister, resigned from cabinet around the same announcement - which the Fraser Institute piece itself noted, dryly, might be the strongest evidence yet that this particular MOU could actually produce something real, since a minister doesn’t typically quit over paperwork that goes nowhere.
Worth sitting with, too: the Globe and Mail’s own reporting captured how deeply “MOU” has embedded itself in Carney’s specific communication style - alongside other finance-world terms like “strategy” and “catalyzing” that have crept into how his entire government talks. One former top bureaucrat, quoted in that same piece, posed the question everyone in Ottawa is actually asking: “I think we may look back on 2026 as the year of negotiations and deal-making, and what lies ahead is implementation and delivery. Are you actually going to hit the mark on all these strategies and frameworks and agreements and MOUs?”
THE BOTTOM LINE
MOUs aren’t fake. But they’re not finished, either - they’re a starting gun, not a finish line. The historical record, under Trudeau and now under Carney, says most trade commitments take years to become real, if they become real at all, and the ones that don’t convert rarely get a follow-up headline explaining why. Worth circling back to every one of this year’s headline numbers in twelve months and asking a simple question: did it happen?
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What’s your read on the diversification numbers - real shift, or good headlines with the same dependence underneath? Drop a comment below, I read every one.
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