With less than 24 hours before President Donald Trump’s deadline to impose sweeping tariffs on the three biggest US trading partners – Canada, Mexico and China – the global economy is bracing for impact.
With less than 24 hours before President Donald Trump’s deadline to impose sweeping tariffs on the three biggest US trading partners – Canada, Mexico and China – the global economy is bracing for impact.
Canada needs to hit back HARD with counter-tariffs. If we cave here, then where will it end??
Trump thinks he can unilaterally pull out of NAFTA (or whatever the modern equivalent is)? OK, we can unilaterally pull out of the water treaties that say we allow our rivers to flow south of the border.
The time has come for Canada to stop exporting any raw resources at all. Water, lumber, cattle, crude, LNG … keep it and refine/process it and sell finished goods only.
Canadians may have forgotten how quickly the US caved on keeping cattle from being imported to the northern US states for processing when Alberta and Saskatchewan called their bluff near the end of the Mad Cow scare around 2003… Canada had all the paperwork to prove herds were being tested properly for mad cow disease, but the US wanted to leverage the fear to keep Canadian beef out to help their own farmers; so Canada decided to start building more beef processing plants locally. They panicked and re-opened exports fearing we’d become self-sufficient for beef production and stop sending our cattle to them for good, destroying their processing industry.
Personally, I think an same sized export tax, even just on oil and gas exports, would do well to get the point across.
No, IMO we need to be ruthless to make sure they don’t try to go any further. The time for ‘tolerance’ is past.
I mean I think an effective 60% increase in the cost of oil and gas for Trump is a lot more ruthless than some terrifs on luxury goods, which seems to be the current preferred option, as Amarican industry and Trump’s base is going to care a lot more about that than an slight decrease in Canadian sales.
Moreover, if you halt exports altogether than US companies just substitutes alternate suppliers, export taxes by contrast are far more likely to result in Us companies paying the higher fee in hopes that things will return to normal soon, and thusly have more of an impact on prices in the US.