Return of US taxes on Canadian aluminum starting this Sunday

Text by: RFI Follow

3 min

From this Sunday, August 16, the United States is imposing tariffs of 10% on imports of Canadian aluminum in order to protect American producers. Furious, Canada has promised countermeasures that will be implemented in mid-September.

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Donald Trump has followed through on his threats. The President warned that if Canadian aluminum imports did not drop, he would reimpose tariffs. According to him, Canadian exports have only increased over the past year, which the Aluminum Association of Canada disputes.

For Ottawa, the implementation of these tariffs is incomprehensible, a few weeks after the entry into force of the new free trade agreement between Canada, the United States and Mexico. Furious, the Canadian government replied: it intends to apply from September 16 customs duties of an equivalent value of 2.2 billion euros on several products from the United States. Their list is being drawn up.

The Canadian authorities do not understand either why the American administration is revisiting this case closed just over a year ago. Indeed, in May 2018, Donald Trump had already imposed similar tariffs on Canadian aluminum. He lifted them a year later.

► To listen: Donald Trump relaunches the trade war with Canada

To keep the workers of Pennsylvania and Ohio happy

For Canada, 80% of whose exports go to the United States, a peaceful trade relationship is essential. But if the two countries shared a special relationship until the election of Donald Trump, since the billionaire's arrival at the White House, Ottawa knows that he can now suffer the commercial wrath of the American president, especially during an election period, as explained by Frederick Gagnon, holder of the Raoul-Dandurand Chair in Strategic and Diplomatic Studies at the University of Quebec in Montreal.

Donald Trump “  does not distinguish between the traditional allies of the United States and other countries, underlines Frédérick Gagnon, at the microphone of Sylvie Noel , head of the international service of RFI. It is a vision inherited from his career as a businessman. Trump likes to destabilize and even if you are traditionally a friend of the United States, he will do so towards you if he feels that you have adopted economic policies unfavorable to American interests. And Donald Trump has such an electoral vision of his international policies in the run-up to the 2020 elections. It seems to himself that it can pay off on the electoral level to impose new tariffs on aluminum because there is American workers who will welcome this in key 2020 election states, including Pennsylvania and Ohio . "

► To listen: Alliances and power Politics in Trump era - Interview with Frédérick Gagnon

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