As we have been reporting, Canadian and Mexican exports to the US will face a 25 percent tariff starting on Tuesday, and there will be a 10 percent levy on energy resources from Canada.
Canada, however, hopes the tariffs will not take effect on Tuesday but the Canadian public expects their government to stand firm in a trade dispute with Washington, the Canadian ambassador has said.
“I think the Canadian people are going to expect that our government stands firm and stands up for itself,” Ambassador Kirsten Hillman told ABC News.
“We’re not at all interested in escalating, but I think that there will be a very strong demand on our government to make sure that we stand up for the deal that we have struck with the United States.”
The US Census Bureau listed the 2024 trade deficit in goods with Canada – which sells about 75 percent of its exports to the US – as $55 billion.
Justin Trudeau on Friday said Canadians could be “facing difficult times in the coming days and weeks” after Trump insisted he would impose the hefty new tariffs on goods coming across the border. In response, the Canadian prime minister unveiled matching 25 percent tariffs on 155 billion Canadian dollars worth of US goods. He said 30 billion will come into effect on Tuesday and another 125 billion in three weeks.
On Friday, the right-leaning editorial board of the Wall Street Journal newspaper criticised Trump’s proposed tariffs in a piece titled “The Dumbest Trade War in History”.
Here is an extract from it:
President Trump will fire his first tariff salvo on Saturday against those notorious American adversaries . . . Mexico and Canada. They’ll get hit with a 25 percent border tax, while China, a real adversary, will endure 10 percent. This reminds us of the old Bernard Lewis joke that it’s risky to be America’s enemy but it can be fatal to be its friend.
Leaving China aside, Mr. Trump’s justification for this economic assault on the neighbors makes no sense. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says they’ve “enabled illegal drugs to pour into America.” But drugs have flowed into the U.S. for decades, and will continue to do so as long as Americans keep using them. Neither country can stop it.
Drugs may be an excuse since Mr. Trump has made clear he likes tariffs for their own sake. “We don’t need the products that they have,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday. “We have all the oil you need. We have all the trees you need, meaning the lumber.”
Trump issued a response to the editorial on Sunday, saying: “The ‘Tariff Lobby,’ headed by the Globalist, and always wrong, Wall Street Journal, is working hard to justify… the decades long ripoff of America, both with regard to trade, crime, and poisonous drugs.”
By Yohannes Lowe and Vicky Graham
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