Well, isn’t this something. Canada had two weeks to cut a deal. They had American negotiators offering to bring car and metal tariffs down from 25% to 15%. They had their own trade minister standing outside the U.S. Trade Representative’s office Thursday night telling reporters “we’re very close, we continue to make progress.” And then Friday night, Prime Minister Mark Carney packed up his negotiators and sent them home to Ottawa.
Policy Exchange (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsSo now 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods kick in at midnight. Hockey sticks, building materials, liquor, clothing. All of it.
Bless his heart, but Carney issued a statement saying “that progress has not been enough to meet our objectives for Canadians.” What objectives, exactly? The ones where you keep full access to the biggest consumer market on earth while your provinces ban American alcohol from the shelves? Because that’s what was happening. Carney had to ask his own provincial premiers to lift their bans on American booze just to make the talks work, and Quebec’s premier said she was still “analyzing” the request. Analyzing it. Like it’s a complicated math problem and not an obvious gesture of good faith.
Benjamin Henry Latrobe (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsHere’s what I can see with my own eyes: Canada wanted the White House to drop the Section 338 tariffs entirely and lower rates on steel and aluminum. The Americans were already offering concessions on cars and metals. And Canada still walked.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer put it about as plainly as a person can. He said there are two countries in the world that retaliated against U.S. trade measures: China and Canada. “That’s not the kind of company you really want to be running in,” he said. He’s right, and every Canadian official who heard that sentence knows he’s right.