Both sides have blamed the other, as commentators around the world watch anxiously
The trade war between Canada and United States is news, and not just within our two countries. Here’s what the world is saying.
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According to analysis by Bloomberg, the U.S.-Canada trade talks collapsed over a range of issues where the text of a potential deal was at odds with what Canada believed it had agreed to.
Quoting Mark Wiseman, Canada’s ambassador to the U.S., the news agency said it wasn’t a single issue that led talks to collapse late Friday, but a variety of things.
Wiseman used the metaphor of a handshake deal to buy a house — only for the would-be buyer to learn that appliances weren’t included, the furnace had no warranty, and neither the garage nor the yard were on the same property.
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“As we drilled down, what we discovered was that what our understanding of what had been agreed to was quite different from what was showing up in the documents,” he told Bloomberg.
“When that kind of happens once or twice, it’s kind of understandable, but when it happens consistently, and every interpretation is the most negative interpretation,” then it “got to a point” where they walked away.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer blamed Canada for walking away. He told the New York Times that the deal would have offered Canada tariff reductions in steel, aluminum, automobiles and lumber, specifically cutting the “majority” of Canadian steel exports to a 25 per cent tariff up to a quota, with anything above that remaining at 50 per cent.
He added the U.S. would have lowered the aluminum tariff to 25 per cent without a quota and would have cut the tariff on passenger vehicles, suspended more recent tariffs on the same, and eliminated a lumber tariff. Wiseman told Bloomberg that was “broadly accurate.”
In remark on Monday, Prime Minister Mark Carney alluded to the shifting rationale for tariffs from the U.S. side, “from fentanyl to taxes on U.S. tech giants, to certification of U.S. aircraft, to the sharing of tolls of a bridge that Canada built and paid for, to our dairy policy, to provincial decisions not to sell American alcohol during a trade war, to a television advertisement that quoted Ronald Reagan, to smoke from wildfires, while they threatened our communities.”
