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.
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.