Canadians are still trying to figure out just what the U.S. threat to impose tariffs on goods brought from the northern nation into the country is actually about.
In an interview with the Watertown Daily Times on Tuesday, Tom Clark, the Canadian Consul General in New York, said that the threat of a trade war with the U.S. had united Canadians in a way he hadn’t seen before, and the 30-day pause on the import taxes announced yesterday hasn’t done enough to reassure one of the U.S.’s closest allies that the relationship can continue as it has for decades.
“The threat of tariffs really mobilized Canadians in a way that I have never seen before,” he said. “It became very emotional and very personal to a lot of Canadians.”
The Trump administration’s plan to put a 25% tax on goods imported from Canada, plus a lower 10% import tax on Canadian oil, sent shockwaves through North America when he put the plan together on Saturday. While Trump has threatened the tariffs for months, his moves on Saturday set them up to go into effect by 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. The result would have been dramatic — goods brought into the U.S. from Canada would immediately jump in price by 25%, and there was no floor on the size of imports taxed — even Americans who grocery shop in Canada would be asked to pay a 25% tax when returning through the border. Economic experts predicted a recession in Canada – the country’s smaller economy is more reliant on trade with the U.S. than the U.S. is reliant on trade with Canada, and ahead of the Tuesday deadline, the Canadian dollar fell to its lowest value against the American dollar in over 20 years.
But after a whirlwind day of conversation, negotiation, and strong-arming, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin P. Trudeau and Trump came to an agreement. Canada would establish a ‘fentanyl czar’ to oversee a governmental response to the trafficking and manufacture of the illegal, highly concentrated opiate, and recommit to an already-announced $1.3 billion CAD plan to dedicate more security, and 10,000 extra staff, to securing the U.S.-Canada border. A similar agreement came into effect with Mexico earlier Monday – with a similar 30-day pause of the 25% tax on goods imported into the U.S. from the southern nation in exchange for more Mexican military patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump has regularly talked about the tariffs as a response to illegal fentanyl trafficking across the border, as well as illegal immigration and human trafficking. But Clark on Tuesday said that doesn’t seem to ring true in the case of Canada — only 43 pounds of fentanyl was caught at the northern border last year, meanwhile over 24,000 pounds of the substance came into the U.S. from all other sources.
Clark said he thinks the fentanyl question hasn’t been fully analyzed – and he said the drug poses a greater threat in Canada than it does in the U.S. nowadays.
“One thing that doesn’t get talked about is that on a per-capita basis, Canada suffers from fentanyl more than America does,” he said. “It’s hitting our towns, our cities, and our young people in a greater way than what is happening in the United States.”
He said the Canadian government is very interested in combatting fentanyl’s spread — but it’s not the case the Canadian-made fentanyl is contributing to the epidemic in America, which has actually started to subside in recent years.
“Canadian fentanyl, such as it exists, is a very small stock and rather inefficiently produced, so it’s more expensive than fentanyl to get in the United States,” Clark said. “You’d have to be a pretty dumb criminal to push Canadian fentanyl into the U.S.”
He said the commitment to installing a ‘fentanyl czar’ in Canada is really a Canadian commitment to solving the issue country-wide, both in trafficking and in domestic use.
Trump has also accused Canada of letting many people into the U.S. illegally, by not effectively policing their border.
Clark said that the Canadian government agrees that it’s better to prevent illegal crossings at the northern border – but efforts thus far have been largely effective, and Canada never played a major role in illegal immigration into the U.S. even when the northern border saw a steep spike in illegal crossings.
“There is no crisis at the northern border,” he said. “The numbers show it. Could things be better? Absolutely, and should we try to make them better? Yes. But that border, for over 200 years, has served us extremely well.”
And the northern border region, especially in northern New York, has been a critical part of that relationship. Clark noted that the first case of the U.S. and Canada establishing a fully equitable agreement, where both nations had an equal vote and an equal share of representatives in formal discussions, was when it established the Boundary Waters Commission, which later became the International Joint Commission that regulates the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes – a vast shared water system that both Canada and the U.S. rely on for inland shipping and environmental stability.
“When that was created, the United States for the first time ever gave equality to the other side of the table, there were as many Canadians sitting at the table as there were Americans,” he said. “That really was a breakthrough moment in the development of our relationship.”
Clark said he was not concerned about the long-term implications of this threatened trade war on issues like the IJC, or other areas where the U.S. and Canada collaborate. The north country has many cases of governmental collaboration – the international bridges that connect the countries, the Seaway, the shared management of the Moses-Saunders Power Dam, and many other shared assets.
“We’ve got 50 federal-to-federal agreements between the two countries on waterways, and over 100 provincial bonds, provincial and state bonds, so it’s not just one or two things, it’s a lot of things,” Clark said. “It’s pretty hard to dismantle that.”
“We don’t anticipate at all having to realign ourselves on a country-to-country relationship, certainly as it pertains to the Great Lakes,” he added.
But Clark noted that businesses are not in the same position – there are hundreds of examples of Canadian companies with American outposts, and the reverse is also true. Both countries have many domestic operations that rely on imported goods or materials from the other – and over more than 60 years, the two nations have forged a unique economic partnership that has largely benefited both.
But with the tariff plan only delayed, not canceled, Clark said there’s still uncertainty.
“Uncertainty is never good for business, uncertainty is never good for societies,” he said. “This unfinished business is still there, but what I’m hoping for is that 30 days will allow the temperature to go down, for discussions to take place at a higher level, a less emotional level, and that the arguments of both sides are going to be heard and resolved.”
Meanwhile, Clark and his colleagues in the Canadian diplomatic corps are continuing to push the message that Canada and the U.S. have an irreplaceable relationship that shouldn’t be threatened with tariffs. Clark spent Monday and Tuesday at the New York state Capitol in Albany, meeting with lawmakers, the press, and Gov. Kathleen C. Hochul.
He said Canada acknowledges and appreciates the strong relationship it shares with the U.S. and especially the border regions of the country, including northern New York, and his work this week has been to ensure that gratitude and mutual benefits are clearly seen by all parties involved.
“One thing I am doing is making sure that everybody’s got the facts and figures, because in an emotional argument where there are other issues at play, we can lose sight of what the real numbers are,” he said.
He also said he wanted to communicate a message of gratitude to New Yorkers – whom he said had proven themselves to be friends of Canada in the brief, but still unfinished fight over trade and border security.
“We’ve been through a particularly difficult period, and we found that New Yorkers, upstate New Yorkers in particular, were great friends,” he said. “More than anything, I’m coming to say thanks.”