PM will speak around 2 p.m. ET after Trump says he’ll go ahead with 25% tariffs
Liberal Leader Mark Carney has paused his campaign and is back in Ottawa on Thursday to deal with the fallout from U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed auto tariffs, which would wallop the industry in Canada.
Speaking from the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump delivered a blow to the cross-border auto trade, vowing to bring in a new 25 per cent tariff on finished vehicles imported into the United States, starting next week.
Hundreds of thousands of Canadians jobs are connected to the auto sector — the largest manufacturing industry in Canada and second-largest source of exports to the U.S. after oil.
In a social media post Thursday, the president threatened to further punish Canada and the European Union with duties “far larger than currently planned” if they retaliate against his auto tariffs
I wonder if there’s a way for many of these auto factories to pivot towards a different product. For example, getting a license to produce parts for Leopard 2s or something. Some parts of the EU are already doing that, especially Germany.
The entire auto sector has been stagnating and parts of it has been shrinking lately, so the best way to save the jobs in the industry is for the factories to pivot to a different product within a similar industry, something the government can invest in that they themselves will know how much demand there will be, since basically all of Canada’s tanks and IFVs are so out of date and unmaintained that we have to replace them all in the next decade or two anyways.