Until late Thursday, it appeared that Prime Minister Mark Carney might finally make it through a week of the current election without pausing his campaign because of President Trump’s trade attacks on Canada.
But instead of shaking hands and making announcements, he was back in Ottawa on Friday to chair a special meeting of the cabinet committee grappling with the U.S.-Canada relations.
The meeting, which produced little new public information, followed another week of tumult. Canada enacted its retaliatory 25 percent duty on cars and trucks made in the United States.
And after indications earlier this week from the White House that it planned to add an additional tariff on Canada when Mr. Trump announced sweeping reciprocal duties against most of the world, the president backed off — sort of. He suspended his most extreme global tariffs, the ones that had sent stock markets spiraling downward, and dropped additional levies against Canada.
But here’s the catch: The United States still imposes 25 percent tariffs on cars, steel and aluminum from Canada, as well as any product with less North American content than demanded by the trade agreement between Canada, the United States and Mexico. Oil, gas and some minerals from Canada still remain subject to a 10 percent tariff. And while announcing a pause for most countries, Mr. Trump set the minimum tariff on goods from China — the United States’ third largest trading partner, after Mexico and Canada — at 145 percent.
The net result is that U.S. tariffs are now about 10 times as high, on average, as they were before Mr. Trump returned to the White House.
For Canada, Mr. Carney described the situation as “the best of a series of bad deals.”
[Read: From ‘Be Cool!’ to ‘Getting Yippy’: Inside Trump’s Reversal on Tariffs]
There are already victims. Stellantis has stopped making Chrysler minivans and Dodge muscle cars in Windsor, Ontario, for two weeks, idling about 3,200 of its employees. The Canadian auto parts makers association estimates that 10,000 to 12,000 more workers at its members’ factories in Canada and the United States are also out of work because of the shutdown.
On Friday, General Motors said that it would pause work until October at a plant in Ingersoll, Ontario, that makes a poorly selling electric van and battery assemblies. A spokeswoman told me that the idling of the plant — which has about 1,200 unionized workers, although 700 had previously been laid off — was not related to tariffs and that the company was committed to both the electric van and the factory. Unifor, the workers’ union, blamed Mr. Trump’s unwinding of measures intended to move the United States toward electric vehicles.
Neither Mr. Carney nor anyone else in government has offered any details on how the tariff money will be used. One expert I spoke with said that might be because the upheaval created by Mr. Trump was making it difficult to figure out the future of Canadian industry and thus what should be saved.
[Read: Canada Vows to Use Billions From Trade Retaliation to Aid Workers and Businesses
[Read: Trump’s Tariffs Are Already Reducing Car Imports and Idling Factories]
In a profile, Norimitsu Onishi looks at how Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, has gone from being a sure thing to become the next prime minister — he held a lead of 25 percentage points in the polls — to struggling against a resurgent Liberal Party because of the Trump-induced crisis.
“Mr. Poilievre’s campaign, however, has said relatively little about Mr. Trump and has continued focusing on attacking the Liberals” on crime and economic issues, Nori writes. “Many voters associate Mr. Poilievre with Mr. Trump, analysts say, a link that has become a liability.”
Nori also traveled to a large rally Mr. Poilievre held near Edmonton, where he found that the Conservative leader’s “message of ‘common sense’ against a purportedly corrupt elite resonates the most in Alberta, along with neighboring Saskatchewan,” but at the same time, it was “complicating his efforts to win voters in battleground provinces, especially Ontario and Quebec.”
[Read: The Canadian Political Brawler Who Had a 25-Point Lead and a Problem: Trump]
[Read: Outside His Political Base, a Canadian’s Trumpian Pitch Is a Harder Sell]
For Mr. Poilievre and Mr. Carney, what may be their final tests in the campaign — which ends with the vote on April 28 — will come next week with debates in French and English.
Trans Canada
Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times based in Ottawa. He covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at [email protected].
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