White House hints at ‘carve out’ to save Canada from steel tariffs
WASHINGTON — Canada will get a special “carve out” potentially allowing it to avoid the impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s controversial steel and aluminum tariffs, a White House spokeswoman suggested Wednesday.
After days of drama and a lastminute diplomatic scramble, the White House is hinting that the impending tariff announcement might have some exceptions for the U.S. neighbours based on national-security considerations.
“There are potential carve outs for Canada and Mexico based on national security — and possibly other countries as well, based on that process,” Sarah Sanders said during her daily media briefing.
“That would be a case-by-case and country-by-country basis.” But the drama isn’t over. The formal tariff announcement is expected this afternoon. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro suggested the exemption would come with a catch. He told Fox Business Channel that, at 12:30 p.m. PT, surrounded by steel workers in the Oval Office, Trump will sign proclamations that impose tariffs that kick in within 15 to 30 days on most countries.
He suggested tariffs could still hit Canada and Mexico later. “The proclamation will have a clause that does not impose these tariffs immediately, on Canada and Mexico. It’s gonna give us the opportunity to negotiate a great NAFTA deal for this country. And if we get that, all’s good with Canada and Mexico.”
Intense debates have been going on within the Trump administration about whether to offer any exemptions — some want a hardline approach where the tariffs apply to every country and some want the opposite, meaning full relief for Canada and allies.
Then there’s the third, middleof-the-road approach others have suggested, and which Navarro appeared to hint at: offering short-term relief for Canada and Mexico, while still using the threat of tariffs as a U.S. negotiating weapon at the NAFTA bargaining table.
The pressure from within Washington to go back to the drawing board was illustrated Wednesday in a letter from 107 congressional Republicans, who expressed deep concern about the president’s plans.
The Canadian government isn’t celebrating yet. It kept a low profile following the White House statement about a carve-out. Speaking earlier in the day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he wants to withhold judgment until the final details are out.
“We know from experience that we need to wait and see what this president is actually going to do,” Trudeau said during a news conference just before the Sanders briefing.
“There’s many discussions on this going on in the United States right now. We are going to make sure we’re doing everything we need to do to protect Canadian workers — and that means waiting to see what the president actually does.”
Behind the scenes, a full-court, 11th-hour diplomatic press was underway Wednesday.
It occurred in Ottawa, Washington, New York and even in Texas, where a number of Canadian officials were contacting American peers — some of whom had been pleading the Canadian case.
The fact that Canada might be hit with tariffs had actually become a leading talking point for critics bashing the Trump plan. From Capitol Hill, to cable TV, to the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, commentators ridiculed the idea of a supposed nationalsecurity tariff applied to Canada.
A poll this week suggested the measures are unpopular.
In the final diplomatic push, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland spoke with congressional leader Paul Ryan, and Canadian Ambassador David MacNaughton was to dine Wednesday with U.S. national security adviser H.R. McMaster.
Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan chatted with Pentagon counterpart James Mattis, UN ambassador Marc-Andre Blanchard spoke with U.S. counterpart Nikki Haley, and Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr raised the issue with Energy Secretary Rick Perry at a conference in Texas.
Trudeau, meanwhile, spoke with the president this week.
A source familiar with the lastminute scramble likened it to a high-stakes, reality-show contest, with a drama-courting U.S. president at the centre of the production: “[It’s a] last-episode-of-The Apprentice kind of thing.”
Canada is the No. 1 exporter of steel and aluminum into the U.S., which is looking to impose tariffs under a rarely used national-security provision in a 1962 law, which some critics have called either illegitimate or likely to start copycat measures that threaten the international trading system.
Some in the U.S. administration argue the tariffs must apply to everyone to be effective. If the goal is to keep out low-cost international steel, with excess Chinese supply dragging down the entire global market, they say the U.S. can’t allow any supply in at low global prices.
The counter-argument was that these measures might help some American steel workers, but hurt far more workers in other sectors that use steel, damage the economy as a whole and poison the U.S.’s relationships with the world.