 Canada said Friday it will slap retaliatory tariffs on $2.7 billion worth of U.S. goods, the latest development in a new trade feud sparked by Preside |
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American Shipper |
Post Date |
08/12/2020 |
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¡°Canada will respond swiftly and strongly,¡± Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said at a press conference.
¡°We will impose dollar-for-dollar countermeasures in a balanced and perfectly reciprocal retaliation,¡± she said. ¡°We will not escalate and we will not back down.¡±
Freeland said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will sp the next 30 days consulting with Canadian citizens and businesses on a broad list of aluminum-containing products. Canada¡¯s new duties on U.S. imports, she said, will total $3.6 billion Canadian dollars ($2.7 billion).
Trump, during a speech Thursday at a Whirlpool manufacturing plant in Ohio, announced that he had signed a proclamation reimposing 10 percent tariffs on aluminum imports from Canada that had been lifted more than a year earlier. The president complained that Canada was putting American workers in the aluminum industry at a disadvantage.
Trudeau vowed to enact countermeasures against the U.S. just hours after Trump¡¯s announcement.
Neither the White House nor the Commerce Department immediately responded to CNBC¡¯s requests for comment on Canada¡¯s actions.
The text of Trump¡¯s proclamation says that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross informed Trump that Canadian aluminum imports ¡°increased substantially¡± in the months after the decision to lift the tariffs in mid-2019.
¡°Canadian aluminum is in no way a threat to U.S. national security, which remains the ostensible reason for these tariffs, and that is a ludicrous notion.¡±
That so-called surge ¡°threatens to harm domestic aluminum production and capacity utilization,¡± the proclamation says.
Freeland on Friday lambasted that assertion, arguing that the tariffs will hurt American consumers already suffering from the economic devastation inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic.
¡°In imposing these tariffs, the United States has taken the absurd decision to harm its own people at a time when its economy is suffering the deepest crisis since the Great Depression,¡± Freeland said.
¡°These tariffs are unnecessary, unwarranted and entirely unaccep,¡± she added. ¡°They should not be imposed. Let me be clear: Canadian aluminum is in no way a threat to U.S. national security, which remains the ostensible reason for these tariffs, and that is a ludicrous notion.¡±
Freeland also noted that the new tariffs come just over a month after the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement ¡ª the Trump-backed trade pact that replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA ¡ª went into effect.
¡°Now is the time to advance North American economic competitiveness, not
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