Canada’s foreign minister Joly to meet Rubio as US tariff threat looms
Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly will meet with her US counterpart Marco Rubio in Washington, DC, as Canada seeks to stave off the threat of steep United States tariffs and a potential trade war between the two countries.
Her visit comes as the administration of US President Donald Trump has threatened to slap 25-percent tariffs on all Canadian goods entering the country as early as Saturday.
“Our objective is to make sure that we prevent [the tariffs] and we believe that we can do so,” Joly told reporters in Ottawa earlier this week. “We will continue to engage with our different American counterparts.”
The Canadian government has faced mounting pressure, including from opposition lawmakers and business leaders, to do whatever it can to stave off the potentially crippling tariffs.
The US and Canada are major trading partners. According to Canadian government figures, the countries exchanged $2.7bn (3.6 billion Canadian dollars) in goods and services daily across their shared border in 2023.
But Trump has been threatening Canada and other countries with steep tariffs since he won the US presidential election in November.
Trump had warned that the tariffs against Canada would come into effect on his first day in office on January 20 if the country failed to do more to halt irregular migration and drug trafficking across the border.
He later pushed the plan back to February 1.
“We’re going to be demanding respect from other nations,” Trump said during a video address last week to the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland, last week. “We have a tremendous deficit with Canada. We’re not going to have that any more. We can’t do it.”
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt also said this week that “the February 1 date for Canada” still stands.
“The president is committed to implementing tariffs effectively just like he did in his first term,” she told reporters on Tuesday.
Canada has yet to provide concrete details on what retaliatory measures it plans to enact should the Trump administration impose tariffs on Canadian goods.
