Welcome to Trade Secrets. I’m old enough to remember a time when Canada was a North American country and part of a highly integrated regional trade bloc. Those were the days.

I was sceptical of Canada’s EU ambitions in last week’s newsletter, when the news of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s overture to Brussels was just breaking, and remain so now. Before I explain why, I first look at the US government’s creation of even more work for its customs authorities and whether it will have the desired effect. Charted Waters, where we look at the data on world trade, is on the travails of German industrial bellwether Volkswagen. Email me at alan.beattie@ft.com.

The thing about announcing big sweeping trade policy changes is you have to implement them. And when you’re an administration like President Donald Trump’s, which is better at saying stuff than doing it, or indeed better at saying stuff that sounds good than stuff that makes sense, that’s a problem.

Earlier this month Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which is a part of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), announced its intention to create rules to allow it to poke around in supply chains to try to find goods that are cheating customs law by evading rules of origin. It’s the implementation of something I wrote about before, a crusade against what the Trump administration wrongly calls “transshipment”. (That term instead simply means goods being dropped off and picked up en route to their final destination.)

The burden of complying with this is going to fall on customs brokers and other intermediaries, who will be legally liable if found to be facilitating the transport of fraudulently labelled goods. But is this really going to happen?

Jonathan Colehower, head of global operations and supply chains at the technology company UST, works with big retailers and other companies that depend on international supply chains. He reports quite a lot of scepticism. “Clients of mine are hedging and saying, you know, I think that DHS is so screwed up right now that they couldn’t pull this off if they tried to,” he told me.

It’s quite a thing to suggest of US federal bureaucracy that it is in too much disarray to implement a major policy initiative, and yet here we are. The administration reckons that between $19bn and $26bn in federal revenue is lost because of mislabelled or otherwise illicit trade. The higher end of that is about the same as CBP’s entire budget, suggesting enforcement could pay for itself.

Colehower remains to be convinced. “It’s going to be technically hard getting this done, getting suppliers to comply with the documentation requirements,” he said. The numbers involved are vast: he has one client who receives 10,000 containers a month. Chinese contract manufacturers in particular are notorious for sending product loose in containers that then has to be sorted and accounted for at the receiving end.

We have, of course, seen an increasing amount of supply chain scrutiny. US rules against imports from China’s Xinjiang region and goods made with forced labour; EU laws against products from deforested areas. The pressure on shippers and freight forwarders to examine and regulate vastly complicated global value networks has created an awful lot of jobs in compliance.

CBP has also had to take the strain of Trump’s decision to abolish the $800 tariff-free de minimis exemption for a single consignment. It hasn’t been fun: international postal services have struggled with the tariff requirements and a whole new administrative system has had to be created. The situation has become more manageable since the policy was announced last year, but largely because of a massive drop-off in small parcels: the number of such shipments between September and November last year after the exemption was removed annualises to 29.1mn, compared with 74.8mn in the previous fiscal year. It is always easier to regulate trade if you simply choke it with red tape.

And so to the alleged Canada-EU initiative. I’m only talking here about the trade and economics, which in any case are the most developed bits of what the EU does. You’ll need to ask others about defence and security (this is what I think of whenever I hear that).

First, agriculture will be a massive block on trade integration in more ways than one. The grumpiest Canadian farmers are in the country’s most rebellious provinces, Quebec (known for dairy) and Alberta (known for cattle). Dairy and beef are, by unhappy coincidence, some of the most sensitive sectors in EU farming. Beef in particular is one of the reasons that the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (Ceta) still hasn’t been ratified by several EU member states.

Single market regulation isn’t going to happen either, not least because food pops up again as a problem. For example, Canadian cattle farmers have blocked the updating of a bilateral trade deal with the UK because, ambitiously, they want London to drop its objection to beef raised with growth hormone, as is standard practice in the US. A similar demand will not go down well with Brussels. The highly polluting extraction of crude from oil sands, a big industry in Canada, will also be unpopular in the carbon-pricing EU. 

What else? A youth mobility scheme? Fine by me: I well remember the nice Canadians on the European interrailing circuit with maple leaf flags on their backpacks so no one mistook them for Americans. An innovation would be an EU-wide scheme, not member state by member state. This is the model the UK’s painfully slow negotiations with the EU are striving for. But still, a youth mobility scheme is not general freedom of movement.

At the higher end of the labour market, there’s a mechanism in Ceta for mutual recognition of professional qualifications. But the first such deal, regarding architects, only came into force this year after eight agonising years of negotiation. Qualifications in other professions could be agreed, but will require an increase in political will to accelerate the process. A step beyond the Mutual Recognition of Professional Qualifications (MRPQ) mechanism would be creating a general skilled-worker programme, similar to the EU Blue Card scheme, which would give individuals a national but potentially transferable work permit if they get a qualifying job offer.

These are the substantive things to watch for, the fine detail of skilled-worker permits and mutual recognition of qualifications. Ignore the empty bureaucratic edifices built with prefabricated slabs of abstract verbiage and watch what they’re doing with visas.

If Volkswagen is emblematic of German export manufacturing, the travails of the automaker’s share price have made it clear that German industry, particularly cars, is seriously struggling to compete with China in both its domestic and foreign markets.

• FT reporters give five reasons why the Iran oil shock is different from what we’ve seen in the past.

• World Trade Organization director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala tells the FT that the boom in AI products is masking deeper problems in the global trading system.

• Speaking of the WTO, its annual report assesses how global trade is performing overall.

• Trump has reacted in his usual calm and measured fashion by describing Canada’s overtures to the EU as a “hostile act”.

• Scott Kennedy, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says that this week’s US-China summit will reveal a vacuum of global leadership.

Trade Secrets is edited by Harvey Nriapia