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.
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.