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Photo by AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin/File

The NAFTA-is-dead movement gathered steam on Wednesday. Or maybe it’s just more hot air emanating from the whirling machinery of strategic negotiation leading up to the beginning of the Montreal Round of negotiations scheduled to begin Jan. 23.

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The prospect of NAFTA’s demise has long been a Trump administration product, mostly generated by the president’s periodic and overheated threats.

But now Canada is emerging as a leading source of gloom.

Negative sentiment about the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement has been roiling through Canadian trade and executive circles for months. This week, Canada seems to be deliberately fanning the prospect that the agreement is on the brink.

Two international news agencies, Reuters and Bloomberg, quoted unnamed Canadian “officials” as saying Ottawa is increasingly convinced that Trump is about to pull the plug on the deal.

That alone would trigger market reaction. At the same time, however, Canada fed the engine of doom when it unleashed a trade dispute claim that amounts to a direct attack on U.S. trade practices.

For a brief moment it even seemed possible that Canada just might be making a giant leap toward free trade over the heads of U.S. trade negotiators and against one of the great anti-trade weapons in the arsenal of protectionist states: anti-dumping and countervail regimes.