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Conrad Black: Trump's unfair tariffs are an opportunity for Canada

We must work to improve our competitiveness and standard of living

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It is not clear why the Trump administration keeps scraping the tariff barrel. The latest tariff elevation reaches back 96 years to an obscure provision entitling the president to impose tariffs on countries that discriminate against U.S. commerce. Canada’s offence in this regard is apparently our odious system of supply management, our retaliatory tariffs against American cars and provincial alcohol bans. Another 60 countries were also threatened with new duties under a law entitling the United States to impose tariffs on countries that import from other countries that employ slave labour. It was an ingenious method of skirting around the Supreme Court’s decision that the administration could not impose its “Liberation Day” tariffs on the grounds of a national emergency.

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This was an understandable ambition, and U.S. President Donald Trump has improved the comparative American trading position with almost every economically serious country in the world except China and Canada. He had reduced the absurd trade deficit in goods of almost $1.3 trillion in 2025 to an extent that justifies the slight inflationary pressure that was counterbalanced by a generally declining inflation rate until the numbers became skewed by the Middle East war. Trump would surely appreciate less agitated relations with Canada, though that was not discernible in his high-handed treatment of the new bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ont. That was an annoying episode, compounded by Prime Minister Mark Carney’s pretense that he made a good deal of it.

Conrad Black: Trump's unfair tariffs are an........

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