The final countdown is underway; Canada is just one day away from the punishing import tariffs threatened by President Donald Trump.
Canadian government officials say they still don’t know if the tariffs WILL come down on March 4th, but Canada has stepped up its campaign to persuade Trump that the tariffs are a bad idea and would hurt both countries.
Trump himself said as recently as last Thursday, February 27th, that he still intends to slap Canada with tariffs this week, after a month-long pause.
“So, the tariffs will go forward. Yes, and we’re going to make up a lot of territory. All we want is reciprocity. We want reciprocity,” Trump said.
Trump has cited concerns about the flow of fentanyl and illegal migrants crossing into the United States from Canada and Mexico as the reason for the tariffs. But given the unpredictability of the President and the mixed messages coming from his administration, it’s not clear when the tariffs will come or how much they might be.
Anita Anand is Canada’s minister of internal trade and one of the ministers who met with senior officials in Washington over the past week.
“The sense across the system is one of needing to wait and see what happens. But from the Canadian standpoint, we have continually said that we will meet any Trump tariffs dollar for dollar, and we will retaliate to the tune of about 155 billion dollars in aggregate,” Anand said.
On Sunday, Trump’s top trade official, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, called the level of tariffs “fluid” during an appearance on Fox News. Doubling down on the March fourth date but saying if it’s 25 percent or a different number is up to the president and his team.
And so, Canadians continue to push their message in Washington.
Canada’s steel industry will likely be hit hard, as well as the auto sector.
Colin Bird is Canada’s Consul General in Detroit, He’s bringing the message that the pain won’t be just one-sided.
“They absolutely recognize that this would be a body blow to the auto sector in the United States, particularly the Great Lakes economies. So if you’re looking at the impact on the territory that I represent in Canada, it is more disproportionately impacted than almost any other area of the country. And if you look at the polling, for example, they understand that this is going to be bad for Canada, this is going to be bad for Michigan,” Bird said.
There’s been a month-long diplomatic push to change some minds in D.C about migrants and fentanyl. Ottawa announced a 1.3-billion-dollar border plan to bolster security along the border, including appointing a fentanyl czar, and that’s Kevin Brosseau, a former deputy commissioner of the RCMP and since December the deputy national security and intelligence advisor to the prime minister.
“Having somebody who is first and foremost being a point person singularly focused on dealing with the fentanyl scourge in Canada, and at the border, is important for them. So that it's not disparate, it’s not a shared responsibility between a whole bunch of government departments so they don’t know who to talk to, they have that clear understanding with me being here,” Brosseau said.
Trump has added a new wrinkle in his tariff threat, looking at softwood lumber imports from Canada and hoping to boost US production. He’s ordered a new trade investigation that could slap even more tariffs on imported softwood lumber, a contentious trade issue between Canada and the US for decades.
Now Canada’s lumber industry is also bracing for crippling tariffs, Canada has already challenged the US on what it calls unfair duties on Canadian softwood lumber. Kurt Niquidet is the president of the British Columbia Lumber Trade Council. He says the only real solution is a negotiated settlement on lumber.
“There could be significant impacts on some of the production in Canada, which has ripple effects throughout the supply chain and has implications for workers and communities. We think a longer-term solution would be to come to a long-term agreement, a negotiated settlement. But so far that hasn’t happened,” Niquidet said.
Many Canadians are confused about Trump’s tariff plans; timelines have continually shifted, and it remains unclear if Canada can make a deal on any exemptions. Cabinet minister Marc Miller says Ottawa doesn’t know either; he says Canadians will know when we know.
