Canada has been telling the world its trade pivot is working.
Pull out two goods from the math, and the whole story falls apart.
Prime Minister Mark Carney's whole pitch to voters last year was getting Canada off the US. The tariffs spooked people. The need felt like a flaw.
He vowed to double non-US exports over the next decade. It was a big goal. He sold it well.
A year and a half in, the score looks great. Ottawa's latest budget says non-US goods exports are up about 36% since 2024. It called the plan a success.
Then Bloomberg looked at the customs data line by line. Two goods did almost all the work: gold and oil.
Strip out gold and bars. Canada's non-US exports are flat versus before the trade war.
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Canadian shipments of precious metals climbed 70% from December 2024 through March 2026. Most of that came from the price of gold rising fast.
Exports to the UK alone almost tripled. Here's the catch: some of that gold never crossed the border at all.
Customs data tracks goods that move. Trade data tracks who owns them. The gap between the two in March shows a chunk of Canadian gold just changed hands inside Canada. It got counted as an export anyway.
Energy is the other piece. Shipments to Asia have grown since the Trans Mountain pipe got bigger in 2024. That gave Canada real access to buyers beyond the US.
But total energy exports were flat. They stayed flat until the Iran war in late February pushed oil prices higher.
Marc Ercolao, an economist at TD Bank, said most of the move comes down to bars and crude. In plain English: when those prices fall, the "pivot" falls with them.
Andrew DiCapua, an economist at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, gave it a careful read. Canadian firms are slowly finding non-US buyers.
The number of firms shipping outside the US grew by about 300 last year. That was the first jump since 2019. But the dollar value of those sales is still small.
His point: until Canada builds real export gear, the trade pivot only looks like a win when gold and oil play along.
Carney has put new energy plants and faster permits at the heart of his second-term plan. IEA chief Fatih Birol said Canada needs to move faster on export gear.
The pivot math gets better with every new pipe and LNG dock. Right now, the numbers are mostly riding a wave. When the tide goes out, the trade story does too.
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