Justin Trudeau played coy when asked by Chuck Todd if he knows what President Trump hopes to gain by retracting Canada’s exemptions from his steel and aluminum tariffs.
Trudeau, in an interview that aired on Sunday’s broadcast of “Meet The Press,” opened the exchange by noting how “incredibly interwoven” the U.S. and Canadian economies are.
“The fact that the president has moved forward with these tariffs is not just going to hurt Canadian jobs. It’s going to hurt U.S. jobs as well, and neither of those things is something that Canada wants to see,” he said.
Trudeau stated that he knows Trump values spontaneity and “being unpredictable from time to time,” but when pressed by Todd as to the motivation for Trump’s tariff action, he simply responded, “I don’t know.”
“The reason I don’t know is because he’s talked about the fact of this, he’s worried about trade surpluses, trade deficits around the world. Well, they have a $2 billion surplus on steel with us. So it’s not like the trade is imbalanced against the U.S. favor on this one. And on China, we’re very much aligned,” the prime minister stated.
“We’ve been taking significant measures against trans shipment, against Chinese steel coming into Canada, in … underhanded ways because we have the same concerns in our steel foundries that the Americans do. And this is just going in the wrong direction.”
Trudeau added that he hopes to have “a frank conversation about where we can work together to grow our economies, to help Canadian workers and American workers who are working in the same, in the same way to build a better future for their families,” when he meets with Trump at the upcoming G-7 summit.
Trump publicly wondered Saturday about the media’s “unfairness” in its coverage of the tariffs.
“Why is it that the Wall Street Journal, though well meaning, never mentions the unfairness of the Tariffs routinely charged against the U.S. by other countries, or the many Billions of Dollars that the Tariffs we are now charging are, and will be, pouring into U.S. coffers?” the president tweeted. “The U.S. has been ripped off by other countries for years on Trade, time to get smart!”
