Sept. 8 (UPI) — U.S. President Donald Trump initiated sweeping trade restrictions targeting Canada on Tuesday, banning the importation of certain Canada dairy-related products, alcohol and motorcycles, escalating the trade war between the neighbors.
In three separate proclamations, Trump directed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to bar certain Canadian products from entering the United States starting Sept. 29, including a broad range of Canadian alcohol, non-alcoholic beer, molasses, Canadian-made motorcycles and several types of whey and related products.
On Tuesday evening, Trump took to his Truth Social media platform and announced that he was removing Canadian-origin products from the General Services Administration’s Multiple Award Schedules, directing federal agencies to no longer buy those Canadian goods, a procurement system through which the president said more than $50 billion in purchases are made annually.
“Canada has been ripping us off for years, but what many do not realize is that the Canadian Government, including Canadian Provinces, have banned American Small Businesses and Companies from selling into their Government Procurement Markets. This is the case even though Canada gets broad access into the massive American Government Procurement Market, including those of our states,” he said in the statement.
“That is not reciprocity, it is a Canadian Trade Scam.”
Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc late Tuesday said on X that Ottawa was assessing the effects of the latest U.S. measures. He said he was communicating with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
“When the United States is ready to engage in dialogue, our government will work in good faith and constructively toward establishing safe and mutually beneficial trade relations that fully respect Canadian sovereignty,” he said.
Numerous Democrats, and a growing number of Republicans, worried about the economic effects the trade war will have on their states, have voiced opposition to the tariffs.
“I think we need to remember that Canada is not China,” Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, told reporters following a campaign event on Tuesday, after calling on Greer in a letter late last month to renew negotiations with Ottawa.
“It’s not our adversary. It is our friend, our neighbor and our closest trading partner,” she said, the Bangor Daily News reported.
Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, lambasted Trump’s “chaotic and irrational trade war” for harming workers and businesses in his state, which he said was one of the most trade-dependent in the nation, exporting more than $4 billion to Canada in the first half of the year.
“I’m looking forward to meeting with Ambassador [Mark] Wiseman of Canada in the coming weeks to see what we can do to mitigate this situation,” he said online.
The measures were announced hours after Canadian tariffs went into effect at midnight Tuesday on $20 billion worth of U.S. imports, retaliation against the United States, which imposed tariffs on Canadian goods last month.
Tuesday’s actions greatly escalate a trade war between the once-close allies that began in February with Trump-imposed levies that prompted Ottawa and several Canadian provinces to respond with their own countermeasures.
Trump has long turned to tariffs as a tool to punish nations and as a negotiation tactic to secure more favorable trade deals for the United States. In part, the measures are being employed here to increase pressure on Ottawa to return to the negotiating table on a new trade agreement after negotiations collapsed on Aug. 21, when the government of Prime Minister Mark Carney exited the talks following last-minute U.S. demands that it said it could not accept, including those affecting Canada’s sovereignty and protections for its French language and culture.
Relations between Canada and the United States have precipitously fallen during Trump’s second administration, with Trump and his Cabinet throwing insults at Canada, threatening to annex it and make it the 51st state and, most recently, attempting to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” for U.S. federal use, a move Indigenous leaders condemned as attempting to erase their people’s history, culture and identity.
Prospects of Canada bending to the new U.S. measures appear unlikely, as Carney has said that relations between Ottawa and Washington will not return to what they once were, and, last week, he said talks would only resume once “the Americans stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough and start being serious about having those discussions.”