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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said his country is prepared to work with the US in “constructive ways” after President-elect Donald Trump said he would introduce 25% tariffs on goods coming from Canada.
The tariff proposal made by Trump has been met with concern from Canadian officials. Doug Ford, the premier of the province of Ontario, described it as “devastating”.
Trump also said he would impose a similar tariff on Mexico and an extra 10% on goods coming from China.
Trudeau sought to reassure Canadians and will hold a meeting on Wednesday with Canadian provincial and territorial leaders to discuss how to move forward.
“This is a relationship that we know takes a certain amount of working on, and that’s what we’ll do,” Trudeau told reporters on Tuesday.
He and Trump spoke over the phone on Monday evening, after the president-elect announced the proposed tariffs in a post on Truth Social.
The 10-minute call was a “good conversation,” a Canadian official told the BBC. The two discussed trade and border security, the official said, with Trudeau pointing out that the number of migrants crossing the Canadian border was much smaller compared to the US-Mexico border.
Trudeau said he also immediately reached out Ford, Ontario’s premier, to schedule a meeting between the prime minister and Canadian premiers.
In a public statement, Canadian ministers emphasised their work on the shared border – on which they said they placed the “highest priority”.
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc also used their statement to stress the importance of the US-Canada trading partnership, saying 60% of last year’s US crude oil imports originated in Canada.
America’s northern neighbour accounted for some US$437bn (£347bn) of US imports in 2022, and was the largest market for US exports in the same year, according to US data.
The 25% tariff on goods from Canada would be signed straight after he took office on 20 January 2025, Trump said on Monday.
He described the move as an effort to get the three other countries to toughen up on the illegal flow to the US of people and drugs, specifically fentanyl.
Canada’s industry minister Francois Philippe Champagne noted on Tuesday that the tariffs will have a serious effect on the US economy, and particularly the price of energy for Americans.
Ford said the proposed tariff would be “devastating to workers and jobs in both Canada and the US”.
He called on the government to “take the situation at our border seriously”.
Ford was echoed by the premiers of Quebec and British Columbia, while a post on the X account of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith acknowledged that Trump had “valid concerns related to illegal activities at our shared border”.
The Canadian American Business Council (CABC) said “we strongly oppose” the proposed tariff, which the council said would undermine a North American trade agreement between Canada, the US and Mexico that was renegotiated under Trump’s first term.
The CABC statement added that the move would “harm businesses on both sides of the border and erode the economic and geopolitical strength of North America.”
Other business voices urged calm. “We’ve gamed out the possibilities that he lumps Canada and Mexico issues together, we’ve been there before,” said the head of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association (APMA) in a statement reported by CBC. “We are prepared and connected.”
Tariff hikes touted by Trump on the election trail could be a negotiating strategy, it has previously been suggested by the man picked by the US president-elect to be his new US Treasury secretary.
“My general view is that at the end of the day, he’s a free trader,” Scott Bessent said of Trump in an interview with the Financial Times before he was nominated for the role. “It’s escalate to de-escalate.”
What’s the issue at the US-Canada border?
Trump’s new border tsar Tom Homan has called the northern border an “extreme national security vulnerability”. He has alleged that Canada is being used as a path to enter the US by people from countries deemed to sponsor terrorism.
Illegal crossings from Canada to the US are vastly outnumbered by the number that take place from Mexico, another country targeted by Trump’s planned tariffs. But there appears to have been a surge.
Robert Garcia, a border official covering the US north-east, said last month that more than 19,000 people from 97 different countries had been arrested over the previous 12 months, which was more than “the last 17 fiscal years combined”.
Experts have told the BBC that America’s northern border is longer and less guarded than the southern one, with a similar presence of criminal smugglers.
One recent high-profile trial in the US shed light on smuggling operations that help foreign nationals move to North America unlawfully.
A jury in the US state of Minnesota found two men guilty of helping bring an Indian family from Canada to the US in January 2022, leading to their deaths.
Mark Miller, Canada’s immigration minister, said on Tuesday that the US and Canada have a shared interest in making sure the border is “manageable and controlled”.
He added Canada is looking at a number of measures, including deploying additional resources and bolstering the number of agents to patrol the border.
North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the presidential election in his twice weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.
