Canadian Deputy Secretary of State Chrystia Freeland attended a news conference as efforts continue on March 23, 2020 to curb the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) disease.
Blair Gable | Reuters
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 said at a news conference.
“We will impose dollar-for-dollar countermeasures on a balanced and perfectly reciprocal repayment,” 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, total $ 3.6 billion ($ 2.7 billion) in total.
Trump announced during a speech Thursday at a Whirlpool manufacturing plant in Ohio that he had signed a proclamation refunding 10% 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.
“The aluminum company was decimated by Canada,” he said.
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 Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross informed Trump that Canadian aluminum imports “increased substantially” in the months following the decision to lift tariffs by mid-2019.
That so-called surge “threatens to damage domestic aluminum production and capacity use,” 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 imposing these tariffs, the United States has made the absurd decision to harm its own people at a time when their economy has suffered 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 American national security. That remains the obvious reason for these tariffs, 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 advance North America’s economic competitiveness, not hinder it,” she said.
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