Prime Minister Mark Carney said Thursday his government is not considering hitting American goods with more retaliatory tariffs, even as the trade war rages on, because there are signs that the bilateral talks on relief are headed in the right direction.
In all fairness, Carney is kind of stuck in a no-win situation. Some people are ticked off because he seems to be going soft on the US, some are ticked off because lack of trade with the US means that they’re losing their jobs. Some people, I have no doubt, are ticked off at him for both reasons at once, no matter how little sense it makes.
Only a change in circumstances outside of Carney’s control could possibly make everyone happy in the short term. In the long term, hopefully market diversification can take the pressure off, but it’ll be at least a couple of years before that gets to where it needs to be. Legacy businesses with long-term contracts don’t function on Internet timescales. In the meanwhile, he’s doomed to get shit from one side, or the other, or both, regardless of what he does.
We literally had an election over this. The decision was pretty clear to go hard on the US. And there has been nothing to suggest a change in opinion among the electorate.
The alternative was Pierre Polyestre.
We made the better choice between the two who could win.
Judge this guy, but include the alternative in your calculations.
Yes and Pierre Poillievre was definitely softer on the US than Carney. The electorate chose Carney, who was for being harder on the US. And even if you argue that there were other issues at play, the boycott that the country has done is one of the strongest of not the strongest I’ve ever seen, that’s a message that’s clear as day
Yeah. Plus retaliatory tariffs are bad for Canadians when they are on goods we don’t have alternatives for. Retaliatory tariffs on goods that have substitutes aren’t, however they might still provoke counter-retaliatory tariffs on things Canadians make, which is also bad for Canadians. That’s why retaliatory tariffs are employed to affect a change on the other side. US hurt us, so we’re hurting the US in order for the US to stop hurting us, enduring extra pain while we’re doing it. That however stops making sense if we’re reasonably sure the US won’t stop hurting us. In such a scenario we should stop hurting ourselves pointlessly. We should instead use tariffs and other measures in order to encourage domestic production or import from other countries. And such tariffs wouldn’t be tactical retaliatory tariffs but instead long-term policy that would produce the supply chain shifts we want. It could still very much be an elbows-up approach but on a different basis. It would be nice to be in a position to more or less ignore what the US says or what tariffs they put up, without much bother. We’re not there at the moment and they’re not moving much. Perhaps as the economic conditions in the US worsen, we might be able to get them to back down a bit.
We should be doing export tariffs not import tariffs. Tax our energy exports to the US and cause a market shock for them.
I think everyone is afraid we’re legitimately getting invaded if we turned off the energy taps. 😄 But in a world where our armies were a bit more balanced or if we had nukes, totally.
Then he shouldn’t have opened with the elbows up rhetoric.
Nobody forced him to do promise he can’t respect.
True. Maybe they think keeping a low profile will minimize the disruption while we diversify, but hoping for a return to a status quo is just naive. Putting up a flight might get him some flak from those impacted by the trade war, but appeasement and compromise don’t work with fascists.
We should have hit them with the digital services tax and used that to fund relief projects. Tax the foreign rich. But this is Carney so we get austerity instead.
Who’s losing their jobs because of Canadian tariffs? I’ve only heard of people losing their jobs or going out of business because of American tariffs. The Canadian tariffs on US goods just forces Canadian businesses to source products from Canada instead of the US, which helps job growth in Canada.
As we can see with Stellantis, Carney’s elbows down approach isn’t helping us here.
Even if the final product is made in Canada, some of the inputs may have to come from the US, and it can take time for manufacturers on this side to take over where that’s possible.
Cans for beer and soft drinks were an issue for a while, and biting into the bottom lines of craft breweries. Canada has enough aluminum to make all those cans, sure, but not the pre-existing production lines, and tooling up takes time even for a well-understood product.
Even steel is more difficult than you might think—Canada and the US both produce steel, but steel is an alloy with different properties depending on the proportion of carbon or other additives, and some mixes were, as of this time last year, only being made on one side of the border or the other.
There are probably other similar issues, but those are a couple I’m aware of. In the long term it’ll all sort itself, but right now things are volatile, especially for small businesses needing to source peripheral inputs like packaging.
I’d like an approach where we tariffed all American products that Canadian substitutes already exist for, and slowly raising tariffs on the products you mentioned like aluminum for cans to get those production lines ready. Obviously production doesn’t come up overnight but we need to disincentivize businesses from using cheap American substitutes in everything.