Canadian Cabinet ministers meet with Trump's nominee for commerce secretary in bid to avoid tariffs

[December 28, 2024]  By ROB GILLIES

TORONTO (AP) — Two Canadian Cabinet ministers left a meeting at Mar-a-Lago on Friday without assurances President-elect Donald Trump will back away from threatened tariffs on all products from the major American trading partner.

The Canadians called the talks “productive” and said there would be further discussions but one official said the Americans remain fixated on the U.S. trade deficit with Canada.

Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc and Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly met with Howard Lutnick, Trump’s nominee for commerce secretary, as well as North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Trump’s pick to lead the Interior Department.

Trump has threatened to impose 25% tariffs on all Canadian products if Canada does not stem what he calls a flow of migrants and fentanyl into the United States — even though far fewer of each cross into the U.S. from Canada than from Mexico, which Trump has also threatened.

“Minister LeBlanc and Minister Joly had a positive, productive meeting at Mar-a-Lago with Howard Lutnick and Doug Burgum, as a follow-up to the dinner between the Prime Minister and President Trump last month,” said Jean-Sébastien Comeau, a spokesman for LeBlanc.

Comeau said both ministers outlined the measures in Canada's billion-dollar plan to increase security at the border and reiterated “the shared commitment to strengthen border security as well as combat the harm caused by fentanyl to save Canadian and American lives.”

Comeau said Lutnick and Burgum agreed to relay the information to Trump.

A senior Canadian official, however, said the Americans remain preoccupied on the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and want it to shrink. The official spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

Trump has made an issue of the U.S. trade deficit, erroneously calling it a subsidy.

Canada’s ambassador to Washington, Kirsten Hillman, has said the U.S. had a $75 billion trade deficit with Canada last year. But she noted a third of what Canada sells into the U.S. are energy exports and said there is a deficit when oil prices are high.

About 60% of U.S. crude oil imports and 85% of U.S. electricity imports are from Canada. Alberta alone sends 4.3 million barrel s of oil per day to the U.S which tends to consume about 20 million barrels a day.

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

Dominic LeBlanc, Minister of Finance, Public Safety and Intergovernmental Affairs, participates in a news conference after a swearing in ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, Ontario, Dec. 16, 2024. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

Further discussions are expected in the coming weeks. Joly will also have dinner with U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham on Friday.

Trump has been trolling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on social media in recent weeks by calling him the Governor of the 51st state.

Trudeau has not directly responded, but did post a link Thursday to a six-minute video on YouTube from 2010 in which American NBC journalist Tom Brokaw “explains Canada to Americans.”

“Some information about Canada for Americans” Trudeau wrote in the post on X.

The video, which originally aired during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, explains similarities between the two countries, the massive trading relationship and the actions of the Canadian military in World War 2 and Afghanistan.

“In our darkest hours Canada has been with us,” Brokaw says in the video. “In the long history of sovereign neighbors there has never been a relationship as close, productive and peaceful as the U.S. and Canada.”

Trudeau has told Trump that Americans would also suffer if the president-elect follows through on a plan to impose sweeping tariffs on Canadian products.

Nearly $3.6 billion Canadian dollars ($2.7 billion) worth of goods and services cross the border each day. Canada is the top export destination for 36 U.S. states.

Flows of migrants and seizures of drugs are vastly different at the U.S.’s two land borders. U.S. customs agents seized 43 pounds of fentanyl at the Canadian border during the last fiscal year, compared with 21,100 pounds at the Mexican border.

Most of the fentanyl reaching the U.S. — where it causes about 70,000 overdose deaths annually — is made by Mexican drug cartels using precursor chemicals smuggled from Asia.

On immigration, the U.S. Border Patrol reported 1.53 million encounters with migrants at the southwest border with Mexico between October 2023 and September 2024. That compares to 23,721 encounters at the Canadian border during that time.

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