What ultimately influenced U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision last week to delay the tariffs he planned to impose on Canadian imports was arguably Canada’s announcement of targeted retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports, strategically designed to affect Republican-leaning states the most. But the measures that may be enough to make Mr. Trump pause may not be enough to make him back off permanently.
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Consequently, unless retaliatory measures pose a significant economic threat to the United States, Mr. Trump is likely to proceed with imposing tariffs on trading partners with which the country has large trade deficits, such as China (US$350-billion), Mexico (US$130.6-billion), Canada (US$100-billion) and the European Union (US$200-billion).
The key challenge for Canada – and other U.S. trading partners – is clear: to design a package of retaliatory tariffs and countermeasures that maximally affect U.S. economic interests. One effective strategy to do so is targeting the U.S.’s massive and rapidly growing service trade surplus.
I’d like to add something here: any retaliatory action has to be something that will be felt by the US population during the next four years. Because Trump really doesn’t care beyond that.
Retaliation that will be felt slowly, peaking in 5 or 6 years? That’s the Republican dream, as it will keep them in power and make Canada the enemy.
Here’s a different take: measures that affect the population don’t matter at all. He’ll spin it one way or the other, blame somebody and the trollfarm-fed inbred dimwits won’t know any better. It’s useless, elections don’t matter anymore.
Targeting the billionaires, especially in the services industry, will cause them to put the brakes on trump in a SECOND, and halt him in his tracks.
Forget tariffs. Strop sending him oil and electricity. Completely. Immediately.
Hold a press conference that all the comedians will cover.
Or even just stop sending ANY aluminum or steel. They cannot just replace it easily. Their economy would skip the tracks. If you don’t want to stop sending it, put a 50% export tariff on before it even gets to them.
People will notice that.
I feel like Canadians would back our government and Americans would not.
It would all be over in our favour fairly quickly.
I’m of the opinion nearly the opposite. Frankly speaking, he doesn’t care how much the people suffer. Half the population could starve to death and he’d just shrug and say “skill issue”.
I do agree that what we do needs to hurt quickly, but the target are the oligarchs that Trump listens to, not the common people. I mean, unless if you’re trying to incite a civil war over there, but Jan6 couldn’t even be considered anything close to such a thing, and I doubt they’ll reach that point in 4 years no matter how badly they run things into the ground short of publicly executing entire protest marches.