Trade talks with Canada collapsed late Friday night, setting in motion steep 50% tariffs on a wide swath of Canadian goods. The duties went into effect at the stroke of midnight.
After weeks of talks, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that while important progress had been made, “that progress has not been enough to meet our objectives for Canadians.”
“As a result, this evening, I have decided to suspend trade negotiations with the U.S. and have directed Canada’s negotiators to return to Ottawa,” Carney said in an emailed statement minutes before the deadline.
The tariffs impact about $20 billion worth of U.S. imports from Canada, according to the U.S. Trade Representative’s office. The import taxes will hit everything from hockey sticks, to some building materials, liquors and certain kinds of clothing.
Carney says Canada will immediately retaliate against the U.S. “Canada will match those tariffs dollar for dollar to protect our workers and businesses,” he said.
The failure by American and Canadian trade negotiators to reach a deal came after nearly two weeks of furious talks.
Officials on both sides had seemed optimistic about a deal up until the very last moment. On Thursday, the Canadian minister responsible for U.S. trade relations met with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer for several hours.
“We’re very close, we continue to make progress and we’re going to stay here and do the work that is necessary until we get to that point,” Dominic LeBlanc told reporters as he left Greer’s office late Thursday.
Canadian negotiators met again with their U.S. counterparts on Friday and talks stretched until the final hours of the day. Officials remained at the U.S. Trade Representative’s office past 10:30pm E.T. Friday. But ultimately, the two sides were unable to reach a compromise.
In his statement, Carney said “last-minute changes in the U.S. proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.”
“We have recognised from the beginning that America has changed, and that we will not return to our old relationship,” Carney said. “Canada has what the world wants. And we will not allow any nation to determine our future.”
Greer said in a statement early Saturday that Canada “declined to finalize the trade deal under the terms agreed earlier this week.”
“Despite the U.S. offer to Canada to receive the best treatment of any major exporter to our market, new demands and walk backs of other commitments by Canada have upended the careful balance reached in the past days,” he said.
Greer said that a point of contention was Canada continuing to maintain its retaliation against the United States “including, among other things, flat-out prohibitions on certain American goods and services.” Those bans, introduced by Canada’s provinces on the sale of American alcohol, were introduced in 2025 in retaliation for earlier waves of Trump’s tariffs on Canada.
As talks wore on this week, the government of Carney faced some pushback from premiers of Canada’s provinces back home.