Canada said Friday it would hit repeat rates at $ 2.7 billion worth of U.S. goods, the latest development in a new trade feud stemmed from President Donald Trump’s decision to re-impose aluminum rights on the U.S. ally.
“Canada will respond quickly and strongly,” Canadian Deputy Secretary of State Chrystia Freeland told a news conference.
“We will impose dollar-for-dollar countermeasures in a balanced and perfectly reciprocal revenge,” she said. “We will not escalate and we will not turn back.”
Freeland said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will continue the next 30 days in consultation with Canadian citizens and businesses on a broad list of products containing aluminum. Canada’s new obligations on U.S. imports, she said, will total $ 3.6 billion ($ 2.7 billion).
Trump announced during a speech Thursday at a Whirlpool manufacturing plant in Ohio that he had signed a proclamation repaying 10 percent tariffs on aluminum imports from Canada that were lifted more than a year earlier. The president complained that Canada put American workers in the aluminum sector at a disadvantage.
Trudeau promised to introduce countermeasures against the US, just hours after Trump’s announcement.
Neither the White House nor the Department of Commerce responded immediately to CNBC’s requests for comment on Canada’s actions.
The text of Trump’s proclamation says Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross informed Trump that Canadian aluminum imports “increased substantially” in the months following the decision to lift tariffs by mid-2019.
“Canadian aluminum is in no way a threat to American national security, that remains the demonstrable reason for these tariffs, and that is a ridiculous view.”
That so-called steering wheel “threatens to exploit domestic aluminum production and capacity,” the statement said.
Freeland lamented that claim Friday, claiming that the tariffs will hurt American consumers who are already suffering from the economic devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
“In raising these rates, the United States has made the absurd decision to harm its own people at a time when their economy is in the deepest crisis since the Great Depression,” Freeland said.
“These rates are unnecessary, unfair and completely unacceptable,” she added. ‘They should not be imposed. Let me be clear: Canadian aluminum is in no way a threat to U.S. national security, which remains the apparent reason for these rates, and that is a ridiculous view. ”
Freeland also notes that the new tariffs came into effect just one month after the United States-Mexico-Canada agreement – the Trump-backed trade pact that replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.
“Now is the time to promote North America’s economic competitiveness, not to hinder it,” she said.
