Canada was hit with new American tariffs on Saturday after talks between the two governments broke down late on Friday, and Prime Minister Mark Carney told Canadians the same morning that the country was now in a trade war. He called the new duties a miscalculation meant to hurt and divide, said the American side had asked too much and offered too little, and confirmed Canada would match the tariffs dollar-for-dollar from 8 September. The counter-measures are being retaliated "reluctantly", he said, with details to follow in the coming days.
The American duties are 50 percent and narrower than the headline suggests. BBC puts them at about 20 billion dollars of Canadian goods, roughly 5 percent of what Canada sends south, on a list that includes wine, dairy, cement, clothing and hockey equipment — on top of tariffs already in force on steel, aluminium, vehicles and lumber. CNBC adds the legal basis: three proclamations signed in July under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a provision that lets a president impose duties of up to 50 percent on countries found to discriminate against American trade, and one that had not been used since 1949.
Each side says the other moved the goalposts. Carney's account is that last-minute American terms were unfair and uneconomic and called the reliability of any deal into question, and that Washington wanted limits on Canada's freedom to sign trade agreements elsewhere. The US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, said Canada declined to finalise terms agreed earlier in the week, and told Fox News there were no plans to resume talking. Carney, for his part, said Canada had been ready to drop its remaining counter-tariffs on steel, aluminium and autos if the Americans lowered theirs.
On what Canada will tax back, the two accounts we have do not fully agree. Both name steel and dairy. BBC then lists appliances and electronics; CNBC lists agricultural equipment, and pulp and paper. Carney said the detail is still to come, so both are partial.
Domestic reaction in Canada crossed party lines, on BBC's account: the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre called the American levies unjustified, Ontario's Doug Ford said Trump could not be trusted, and British Columbia's David Eby said the demand to restrict Canada's other trade deals would reduce the country to the economic equivalent of a 51st state. Quebec's premier Christine Fréchette warned of job losses. Alberta's Danielle Smith, whose province has courted the administration, urged both sides back to the table. In Washington, CNBC reports, Republican senator Susan Collins noted Maine imports about 2 billion dollars of non-petroleum goods from Canada each year and urged a return to negotiations.
Sitting behind all of it is USMCA, the pact Trump signed in his first term to replace the 1994 free trade agreement, which BBC says underpins 1.6 trillion dollars of annual trade between Canada, the United States and Mexico. Canada and Mexico asked earlier this summer to renew it for another sixteen years; the Americans declined to renew it as it stands. Asked what Friday's collapse means for that, Carney said it was certainly not good news.
Why it is on the board
Fifth on BBC's most-read list when we collected, with a clip on the same story in the British video lens.
The reason it leads the British board rather than sitting mid-list is what the other nine boards look like this morning. We counted the tariff story across today's collection: it is in the reading or video lists of **five of our ten countries** — the United States (second on NBC News and two New York Times pieces), the United Kingdom, Brazil (a television bulletin clip), India (twice on the Times of India) and France, where it sits on two different publishers' lists at once. A story carried by half the boards on the same day is rare here. Most days the ten lists have almost nothing in common, which is the whole reason this board exists.
확인: BBC · CNBC