While outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau enjoys his slow-motion resignation, the country remains rudderless, with a lame duck government trying to rally all the provinces against their new perceived foreign threat: the Trump tariffs.
Yesterday (15), Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the provincial premiers met in ‘high-stakes talks’ over the strategy against the incoming US administration.
Should they use oil and other commodities as a weapon in this potential regional trade war?
Bloomberg reported:
“Trudeau is meeting with the leaders of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories in Ottawa on Wednesday, trying to get on the same page over how to respond if US President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his vow to impose 25% tariffs on all goods the US imports from Canada.
The prime minister and the premiers are preparing a list of retaliatory tariffs. The government has also examined the possibility of harsher measures, such as placing export taxes on oil, uranium and potash to drive up costs for US consumers and businesses in the event Trump starts an all-out trade war.”
Leader of oil-producing Provinces are opposed to this path.
Trudeau said that Canada ‘has the critical minerals’ needed to fuel ‘the technological transformation of the US economy’.
“’If they don’t get them from Canada, they’ll get them from China. If they can’t get them from Canada or China, they don’t get them from anywhere’, Trudeau said. But he also said retaliatory tariffs were on the table and would be discussed at the meeting.”
Ontario Premier Doug Ford is a ‘strong believer’ in retaliatory tariffs:
“’You can’t let someone hit you over the head with a sledgehammer without hitting them back twice as hard, in my opinion’, he said.”
Besides shipping 4 million daily barrels of oil to the US, Canada is also the biggest foreign source of uranium for US nuclear power plants.
To Andrew Furey, from Newfoundland and Labrador, energy is Canada’s ‘queen in this game of chess’.
“’We don’t need to expose our queen too early. The opposition does need to know that the queen exists, but they don’t need to know what we’re going to do with the queen. Let’s see what the tariffs actually are first, and have a proportional — but let me very clear — a strong response to the United States.”
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