Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney “needs to stop campaigning and start governing” at Breitbart’s State of the Economy event on Tuesday in Washington. Bessent said Carney rose to power on an anti-Trump platform that has ultimately harmed his nation’s prospects of completing a trade deal with the United States.
Canada pushed ahead with retaliatory tariffs on $20 billion of U.S. goods early Tuesday morning on products such as American milk, perfume, video game consoles, golf clubs, fishing rods, steel, aluminum, jackets, and T-shirts, according to reports.
In a video announcement, Carney said he was matching U.S. tariffs dollar-for-dollar and that some Canadian families would be hit harder than others as a result.
“This won’t be easy, and I won’t pretend otherwise,” Carney said, saying he wants his country’s citizens to buy and travel Canadian.
Bessent likened Carney’s aggressive response to trade talks to a humorous story about his German Shepherd being fed up with the “yapping” of a miniature dachshund and noted the deal on the table was the best trade deal any country has been offered.
Later, Bessent declared the Canadian tariffs would not add pain to the United States and said he walked his team through an exercise of measuring inflationary impacts. He said even assuming 100 percent passthrough, it would add just .02 percent — “not even a rounding error,” added Breitbart economics editor John Carney.
Bessent concluded his remarks about Canada noting that with trade uncertainty, companies faced with the choice of moving production will choose the United States over Canada.
“If I were the Canadians I’d be careful. They wanted the benefits of being a state without being a state,” Bessent said.