3M pushes back at Trump over masks

WASHINGTON • One of the biggest American manufacturers of protective medical gear went to bat for its Canadian customers Friday as it pushed back against a White House order to stop exporting its surgical-grade face masks — mission-critical armour in the war against COVID-19.

In front of a backdrop of frenzied buying, dwindling global supply and mounting desperation among North American health-care workers, Minnesota-based 3M appeared poised to defy President Donald Trump’s demand that the company’s American-made masks, known as N95 respirators, be reserved exclusively for the U.S. market.

3M is a “critical supplier” of the masks to Canada and Latin America, the company said in a statement, pointing to the “significant humanitarian implications” of denying protective equipment to health-care workers on the front lines of a fight against a global pandemic. Doing so, it added, might elicit a costly hostile response.

“Ceasing all export of respirators produced in the United States would likely cause other countries to retaliate and do the same, as some have already done,” the statement said. “If that were to occur, the net number of respirators being made available to the United States would actually decrease. That is the opposite of what we and the administration, on behalf of the American people, both seek.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tried to strike a diplomatic tone, insisting that Canadian and U.S. emissaries were in talks to keep goods, services and commerce moving across the border.

In so doing, he framed U.S. isolationism in terms of the potential consequences for Americans themselves.

“We are receiving essential supplies from the United States, but the United States also receives essential supplies and products and, indeed, health-care professionals from Canada every single day,” Trudeau said.

“These are things that Americans rely on, and it would be a mistake to create blockages or reduce the amount of back-and-forth trade of essential goods and services, including medical goods, across our border.”

The frantic scramble for some of medicine’s most basic fixtures — from paper gowns to high-tech ventilators — has provided a terrifying subplot to the mounting COVID-19 caseload and death toll in the U.S., Canada and around the world: more than 1 million cases and nearly 60,000 deaths globally. There are nearly 7,000 deaths in the U.S. alone.

Canada has reported a total of 12,369 confirmed cases, including 178 deaths.

Mark Warner, an international trade lawyer based in Toronto and a veteran of the Canada-u.s. trade dynamic, said he’s concerned that Canada’s efforts to stand on principle in its discussions with the U.S. risk falling on deaf ears if the crisis continues to worsen.

“We’re in a fight,” Warner said. “There’s a limited quantity of this stuff that’s available, and we’re all fighting for it.”