In D.C. Visit, Canadian Leaders Face Trump’s Tariff Hawks

Another week, and another round of tariff threats and annexation suggestions from President Trump.

It began with the announcement of a policy imposing 25 percent tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports. In Canada’s case, those tariffs would be stacked on top of the previously introduced 25 percent tariffs on most Canadian exports, which are in a 30-day holding period. If Mr. Trump follows through on both, the rate on steel and aluminum will be a staggering 50 percent.

[Read: Nations Denounce Trump Tariff on Metals and Warn of Retaliation]

Next up, the president told his advisers to come up with new tariffs that take into account trade barriers and other economic approaches by U.S. trading partners that his administration deems unfair. It’s a sweeping approach that includes not just tariffs that other countries place on U.S. goods but taxes they charge on imported products, such as the G.S.T. in Canada; any subsidies they give industries; and their exchange rates.

“Canada’s been very bad to us on trade, but now Canada is going to have to start paying up,” Mr. Trump said while making the announcement. “Canada is going to be a very interesting situation because, you know, we just don’t need their product.”

Among the things that may be targeted, according to a fact sheet released by the White House, is the 3 percent tax Canada began applying last year to the Canadian revenues of large tech companies like Google, Amazon and Netflix. Again, any tariffs that emerge from this review will be added onto whatever else Mr. Trump has already threatened to impose on Canadian exports.

[Read: Trump Says He’ll Rework Global Trading Relations With ‘Reciprocal’ Tariffs]

A small number of U.S. business leaders have started to speak out against Mr. Trump’s tariff plans, if not directly speaking up for Canada.

Jim Farley, Ford’s chief executive, told an industry conference that “a 25 percent tariff across the Mexico and Canadian border will blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we have never seen.”

Speaking of Mr. Trump’s plan to revive American manufacturing through tariffs, he added, “So far what we’re seeing is a lot of costs and a lot of chaos.”

[Read: Ford Chief Executive Says Trump Policies May Lead to Layoffs]

Mr. Farley’s message echoes what Canadian officials have been telling anyone who will listen in Washington. This week, all 13 provincial and territorial leaders visited the U.S. capital to deliver that argument and others about the importance of trade between the countries and observations about the interlinked nature of their economies.

While 11 of the premiers did ultimately get a last-minute meeting at the White House, it was with Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff for legislative affairs and the president’s director of personnel.

“I don’t think the premiers met with people who are very significant,” Gary Mar, the president and chief executive of the Canada West Foundation, a public policy research group based in Calgary, told me.

Mr. Mar was Alberta’s official representative in Washington from 2007 to 2011. He said that Canada’s place in the United States had shifted substantially since then.

“I think our relationship with the United States has changed forever,” Mr. Mar said. “Donald Trump is not the reason for this. He is a symbol. The people who went to war with the United States — that generation is gone. And in the U.S., a culture of achievement has been replaced by a culture of grievance.”

Cultural shifts aside, Canadian politicians hoping to change minds in Washington may be delivering arguments that many people close to Mr. Trump flatly reject.

Many, if not most, of Mr. Trump’s tariff actions have closely tracked the ideas of Robert E. Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative in the first Trump administration.

Mr. Lighthizer does not, to put it mildly, believe that the move toward more open trade over the last four decades has benefited the United States.

“The global trading system has failed our country,” Mr. Lighthizer, who led the U.S. side during the NAFTA renegotiation, wrote this month in a guest essay for the opinion section of The New York Times. “It has not faltered because free trade doesn’t work. It has failed because free trade doesn’t exist.”

[From Opinion: Want Free Trade? May I Introduce You to the Tariff.]

While Mr. Lighthizer does not specifically discuss trade with Canada in that essay, he has little good to say about it in his book, “No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking On China, and Helping America’s Workers.”

“Canada is in reality a quite parochial — and at times quite protectionist — country,” he wrote. “For years Canada has operated a dairy supply chain management program that would make a Soviet commissar blush.”

Mr. Lighthizer, who like Mr. Trump abhors trade deficits, is proposing a new global trading order that would split the world’s economy in two. In one group, countries would generally charge one another lower tariffs. However, if one of the group’s members developed a trade surplus, the others would increase tariffs against its exports until that surplus disappeared. And this group of countries would charge high tariffs to countries outside it — “nondemocratic countries as well as those that insist on using beggar-thy-neighbor, aggressive industrial policies to run large surpluses,” he writes.

In a profile of Mr. Lighthizer, Elizabeth Williamson and Ana Swanson, my colleagues in Washington, write that when economists, like Canadian politicians, argue that high tariffs will only increase prices for Americans and might even cause a recession, “Mr. Lighthizer simply argues that the economists are wrong.”

Trans Canada

This section was written by Vjosa Isai, a reporter-researcher based in Toronto.

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Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times and is based in Ottawa. Originally from Windsor, Ontario, he covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at austen@nytimes.com. More about Ian Austen

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