Canada is striking back against President Donald Trump’s latest round of tariffs by imposing identical trade penalties on goods from the United States.
Francois-Philippe Champagne, the Canadian minister of finance, announced the measures at a Tuesday press conference in Ottawa. Lamenting that Canada is facing “a trade dispute we did not choose,” he said the nation would nonetheless confront the challenge in a “proportionate, targeted, and strategic way.”
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Canada, he said, will now “match the U.S. dollar for dollar, rate for rate” on trade penalties, with those measures becoming effective Sept. 8.
The relationship between the United States and Canada has been rocky for several days after trade negotiations between the countries fizzled out on Friday. Ottawa complained that Washington was treating it as a second-class partner, subservient to the U.S.’s interests.
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“They asked too much of Canada and offered too little in return,” Champagne told the crowd in Ottawa on Tuesday. “We stood up for our workers, we stood up for our businesses, we stood up for Canada.”
The decision to walk away from the negotiating table meant that the planned 50% tariff on $28 billion worth of Canadian goods was allowed to go through on Saturday.
Trump then twisted the knife on Monday, announcing that he will be placing yet another round of tariffs on the U.S.’s northern neighbors, specifically on products such as automobiles and car parts. That set of tariffs would go into effect at the beginning of next year.
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Trump has goaded Canada following the collapse of economic negotiations, threatening to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America.
“The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer,” the president said in a post on Truth Social. Lake Ontario’s name comes from the Iroquois language, and the Canadian province was named after the body of water — not the reverse.
The threat to rename the lake mirrors the administration’s previous mandate for all federal agencies to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.”
