U.S.-Canada talks fail; Carney says retaliatory tariffs start Sept. 8

The U.S. imposed 50% tariffs on some Canadian products on Saturday after trade talks between the two countries fell apart on Friday.

In response, Canada said it would impose its own retaliatory tariffs beginning on Sept. 8.

Negotiators for both sides had been working on a deal all week, at times signaling that an agreement was near. President Donald Trump had postponed the original deadline of Wednesday just hours ahead of it being imposed, saying that there was a soon-to-be finalized deal. Dominic LeBlanc, Canada’s trade minister for the U.S., told reporters on Thursday that a deal was “very close.”

However, both sides blamed the other for not reaching a deal as the tariffs, impacting roughly $20 billion in Canadian exports, including wine, furniture, dairy products, cement, clothing, fishing rods, hockey equipment, went into effect on Saturday morning.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, in a post on X early Saturday morning, that “Canada declined to finalize the trade deal under the terms agreed earlier this week.”

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a statement released on Friday that despite working toward a deal, “that progress has not been enough to meet our objectives for Canadians,” saying that “last-minute changes in the U.S. proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.”

In a Saturday press conference in Ottawa, Ontario, Carney said that the U.S. demands had gone too far.

“They asked too much and offered too little,” he said, adding that Canada had been willing to drop its remaining retaliatory tariffs on steel, aluminum and autos if the United States lowered its own.

As a result, Carney said Canada would put its own retaliatory tariffs into effect on Sept. 8, and those duties will target sectors such as steel, dairy, agricultural equipment, and pulp and paper, among others. He said additional details on those new measures would be released in the coming days, previously noting that the retaliatory measures would be “dollar for dollar.”

Carney also highlighted the energy relationship between the two countries: “Canada fuels American growth … I don’t think they want us to stop sending any of that energy.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., criticized the retaliatory U.S. tariffs in a post on X.

“Trump just slapped another bill on hardworking American families — who are already crushed by his skyrocketing costs. This nonsense with Canada should have never gone into effect. It must end now,” Schumer wrote.

Greer, in an appearance on Fox News on Saturday, said that there are no new planned talks with the Canadians. “They’ve always had the best deal, and they still would have an even better deal, but they didn’t want that,” he said.

The Trump administration signed three proclamations to impose the additional 50% tariffs on a range of Canadian goods in July, a response it said was due to trade discrimination against multiple U.S. products and industries such as motor vehicles, alcohol and dairy. The tariffs fell under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, which gives the president the power to impose tariffs of up to 50% on the goods of countries found to be discriminating against the U.S., and which had not been used since 1949.

The failure to reach a deal adds another complication to the increasingly tense relationship between the U.S. and Canada. The two sides had already been at the negotiating table regarding their trilateral trade pact with Mexico, known as USMCA, which was not renewed in July over concerns with U.S. trade deficits — a deal that Trump once called “the best agreement we’ve ever made.”