“Doug Ford lost his reason for an election,” Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie said Tuesday on the campaign trail.
Crombie was trying to take the wind out of the Progressive Conservative leader’s sails given the 30-day reprieve that U.S. President Donald Trump gave Canada on the threat of 25% tariffs. But Ford wasn’t backing away from the issue, saying the tariff threat from Trump will come again.
“Make no mistake, Canada and Ontario continue to stare down the threat of tariffs, whether it’s tomorrow, in a month or a year from now. President Trump will continue to use the threat of tariffs to get what he wants,” Ford said Tuesday in Ottawa.
While Ford is clearly using the threat of Trump’s tariffs for political advantage – thus the early election – he’s right that the Trump tariff threat isn’t over. We know this because Trump and his team have made that clear.
Howard Lutnick, Trump’s pick to be commerce secretary, was before the Senate commerce committee last week as part of his confirmation process. He was asked several times about the tariff and trade situation with Canada.
At times, he spoke about how the U.S. feels it is treated badly by Canada on issues like the dairy industry. But it was under questioning from Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, a man who understands the integrated nature of the auto sector, that Lutnick made the plans clear.
“We need to grow domestic manufacturing,” Lutnick said.
“The car manufacturing went to Canada, it went to Mexico. It is important that that come back to Michigan and come back to Ohio and come back to the great states of America that can build. And so I think a thoughtful tariff policy that drives domestic manufacturing, I think, is fundamental to the American workers, especially to the workers in Michigan.”
See, one of the things Lutnick explained is that the tariffs we’ve been fretting about are just about border issues like migrants and drug issues such as fentanyl. You don’t have to agree with the U.S. administration, but that is what they all say about this issue.
Even after those issues have been dealt with, there will be other tariffs later this year that will likely come on a sector-by-sector basis and the auto industry is clearly going to get hit.
“Those studies will come out in the end of March and April,” Lutnick told the committee.
“We are going to study those, the actions and the economy of America and how it works.”
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The bottom line is we got a reprieve in round 1 of the tariff battle. Round 2 will be whether the U.S. is satisfied with the border actions and round 3 will be the studies into the U.S. economy and the impact of tariffs on bringing back American jobs.
The Trump administration is looking to fundamentally alter the U.S. economy and the global trading rules which they no longer believe serve American interests. In fact, they believe that much of the global trading order is stacked against American interests and dates back to the postwar era when the U.S. was the protector of the free world and agreed to trade terms to rebuild Europe and Japan after the war.
Trump and his team are determined to change the rules to better suit America’s interests in their eyes. Anyone who can’t see that or understand that this is about more than a one-off threat of 25% tariffs doesn’t deserve a seat at the table. That goes for those running in this provincial election and for federal leaders as well.
This is not a replay of Trump’s first term and we aren’t playing by the old rules. Like it or not, the rules are changing and we had better be ready to adjust.