Canada working to prevent steep tariffs that US President Donald Trump says could be imposed as early as February 1.
Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly will meet with her US counterpart Marco Rubio in Washington, DC, as Canada seeks to stave off the threat of steep United States tariffs and a potential trade war between the two countries.
Joly is set to hold talks with the US secretary of state on Wednesday afternoon in the US capital.
Her visit comes as the administration of US President Donald Trump has threatened to slap 25-percent tariffs on all Canadian goods entering the country as early as Saturday.
“Our objective is to make sure that we prevent [the tariffs] and we believe that we can do so,” Joly told reporters in Ottawa earlier this week. “We will continue to engage with our different American counterparts.”
The Canadian government has faced mounting pressure, including from opposition lawmakers and business leaders, to do whatever it can to stave off the potentially crippling tariffs.
The US and Canada are major trading partners. According to Canadian government figures, the countries exchanged $2.7bn (3.6 billion Canadian dollars) in goods and services daily across their shared border in 2023.
Experts say both economies would be affected by US tariffs, as well as retaliatory measures from Canada.
But Trump has been threatening Canada and other countries with steep tariffs since he won the US presidential election in November.
Trump had warned that the tariffs against Canada would come into effect on his first day in office on January 20 if the country failed to do more to halt irregular migration and drug trafficking across the border.
He later pushed the plan back to February 1.
“We’re going to be demanding respect from other nations,” Trump said during a video address last week to the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland, last week. “We have a tremendous deficit with Canada. We’re not going to have that any more. We can’t do it.”
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt also said this week that “the February 1 date for Canada” still stands.
“The president is committed to implementing tariffs effectively just like he did in his first term,” she told reporters on Tuesday.
Canada has yet to provide concrete details on what retaliatory measures it plans to enact should the Trump administration impose tariffs on Canadian goods.
Nobody wants to see U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods. But we will be ready with a strong, national response if we need one.
pic.twitter.com/NvxgEleP3N— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) January 28, 2025
Public broadcaster Radio-Canada reported earlier this month that the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has prepared a plan that would impose tariffs on $25.5bn (37 billion Canadian dollars) worth of US goods.
Ottawa is also prepared to enact stricter measures that could cover up to $76bn (110 billion Canadian dollars) worth of goods, Radio-Canada said.
“Everything is going to be on the table,” Jean Charest, a former Quebec premier who sits on Trudeau’s newly formed Council on Canada-US Relations, said in a recent interview with CNN.
“I doubt that you’ll hear Canadian officials talk about what they intend to do until they actually do it, which is the way that we’re going to manage this situation.”
Charest also stressed the importance of Canadian energy exports to the US.
The country is the US’s largest foreign energy supplier: Nearly 60 percent of American crude oil imports came from Canada in 2023, up from 33 percent a decade earlier, according to the US Energy Information Administration research group.
Canada sent about 97 percent of its crude oil exports south of the border that same year. The vast majority of those supplies came from the oil-rich province of Alberta.
“There’s no one though who’s been out there saying we’re going to cut it off,” Charest said. “But there are other options on how we can deal with energy to be able to make our point. We wouldn’t want to do that, but if we have to make our point, we will.”
