AP (Toronto) After U.S. President-elect Donald Trump threatened to impose sweeping tariffs on all Canadian goods, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will meet with all opposition leaders to discuss U.S.-Canada ties.
According to a person with knowledge of the situation, the meeting will take place early on Wednesday afternoon. Since they were not permitted to discuss the issue in public, the individual talked on condition of anonymity.
When the free trade agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico was renegotiated during Trump’s first term in office, Trudeau was successful in using a Team Canada strategy.However, Trudeau’s minority administration is currently in a far worse political position and will be up for election in less than a year.
After dining at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Friday, Trudeau went home without receiving any guarantees that the president-elect will renounce the planned tariffs on all goods from the main trading partner of the United States.
Unless they stop the influx of migrants and narcotics, the Republican president-elect has vowed to slap a 25% tax on all goods entering the United States from Canada and Mexico.
Trump referred to Friday’s negotiations as fruitful, but he made no indication that he would back down from his promise to implement the tariffs as one of his first executive actions upon taking office in January.
Canada is one of the most trade-dependent nations in the world, with 77% of its exports going to the United States. The country claims that Trump is unfairly comparing it to Mexico.
Canada viewed Trump’s attempt to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, and rumors that he was considering imposing a 25% tariff on the car industry as existential threats during his first term.
Trudeau was successful in persuading Trump and important Cabinet candidates that the Canada-U.S. border is not comparable to the Mexico-U.S. border, Canada’s ambassador to Washington Kirsten Hillman told The Associated Press on Sunday. Hillman was seated next to Trump and Trudeau at a table.
Drug seizures and migration patterns are very different. During the previous fiscal year, U.S. customs officers found 43 pounds of fentanyl at the Canadian border, while they found 21,100 pounds at the Mexican border.
Mexican drug gangs employ precursor chemicals that are imported from Asia to make the majority of the fentanyl that enters the United States, where it causes over 70,000 overdose deaths every year.
Regarding immigration, between October 2023 and September 2024, the U.S. Border Patrol documented 1.53 million interactions with undocumented migrants at the southwest border with Mexico. During that period, there were 23,721 interactions at the Canadian border.
For 36 U.S. states, Canada is their biggest export destination. Every day, goods and services valued at around $3.6 billion Canadian (US$2.7 billion) pass the border.
About 85% of the power and 60% of the crude oil imported into the United States come from Canada.
In addition to having 34 vital minerals and metals that the Pentagon is interested in and investing in for national security, Canada is the United States’ top foreign supplier of steel, aluminum, and uranium.
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