U.S. President Donald Trump signalled Friday that he may not reach a deal with Canada, suggesting the northern neighbour will “just pay tariffs.”
“We haven’t really had a lot of luck with Canada,” Trump told reporters outside the White House. “I think Canada could be one where they’ll just pay tariffs, not really a negotiation.”
Trump made the remarks while discussing other trade deals that had been reached with countries ahead of his Aug. 1 deadline.
The remarks come just a day after Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc told reporters he was feeling “encouraged” following meetings with both Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and American lawmakers.
However, LeBlanc had also suggested a new economic and security deal would not be signed before Aug. 1.
“Canadians expect us to take the time necessary to get the best deal we can in the interest of Canadian workers,” LeBlanc said.
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The offices of LeBlanc and Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne both declined to comment on Friday.
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‘Canadians expect us to take time,’ LeBlanc says after US meeting ahead of Trump tariff deadline
Trump sent letters to multiple nations, including Canada, earlier this month saying if no deal is made by Aug. 1, high tariffs on imports would be imposed.
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Canada already has a trade agreement with the U.S. in the form of the Canada-United States-Mexico agreement that took effect in 2020 and which was negotiated with Trump during his first presidency.
While Trump has threatened a 35 per cent tariff on Canada starting Aug. 1, if a deal isn’t reached, items that fall under CUSMA are currently exempt from those tariffs.
But tariffs still remain on Canada on its steel, aluminum and automobile exports to the U.S., with copper duties also expected to take effect in one week.
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Earlier this week at a summit with the nation’s premiers, Prime Minister Mark Carney told them he would not accept a bad deal for Canada.
“A good deal is something that preserves, reinforces and stabilizes those relationships as much as possible. A good deal is also one that doesn’t tie our hands in terms of other things that we can do so that we can pursue that positive agenda that we focus so much of our time on,” said Carney.
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Trump has announced several deals this week with various countries, including Japan and the Philippines, adding to agreements already reached with Indonesia, Vietnam and the U.K.
Details of the various frameworks announced with those countries is still not completely known, but all of them include some form of tariff.
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Carney told reporters last week that even as negotiations were ongoing with the U.S. there was “not a lot of evidence” for any country to be able to get a tariff-free agreement.
Amid negotiations, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators visited Canada on Monday to meet with Carney, even as Lutnick vowed tariffs on Canada were here to stay.
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who was among the group, told reporters in Washington, D.C. on Thursday that they’d like to get to a “better place” with the trade relationship.
She said Canada can’t be treated as “yet one more country that we need to reconcile tariffs on,” though she cautioned she wasn’t “sensing” things would be resolved before Aug. 1.
“I wish that I could say, ‘It feels good,’ that this is all going to be taken care of before the first of August, but I’m not sensing that,” she said.
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