Canadian Leaders Prepare For Immediate Retaliation If Trump Enacts His Tariff Plans

Canada is working on a two-pronged approach to Donald Trump’s threats of tariffs. On the one hand, they are working to give him what he wants in terms of border help. But on the other, they are preparing to launch retaliatory tariffs on goods from the United States if Trump puts tariffs on their goods. The leaders across the country have repeatedly warned that Canada will not be bullied, and they stand to have a stronger impact on us than we have on them, as Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

So about a week and a half ago, the 13 premiers and uh, uh, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau all met. They had this meeting where they discussed what they were going to do as Donald Trump was being prepared to be sworn in as president. Of course now he has been sworn in, but they wanted to come up with a, a firm plan on how to handle Donald Trump, specifically the threat of tariffs against Canadian goods coming into the United States and Ontario Premier, Doug Ford was one of the more outspoken and said that basically we have to put Canada first. So if Donald Trump wants to hit us with tariffs, bring it on because we are absolutely going to retaliate. And most of the other premiers agreed with that. And it appears that Justin Trudeau, even though he is leaving, uh, seems to also be in agreement. In fact, there was only one premier that was not a hundred percent on board with the retaliation, but it does look like Canada is prepared to retaliate hard if Donald Trump puts tariffs on the goods coming to us from them.

But the retaliation, you know, putting tariffs on our goods is not the only plan they have. First and foremost, they have decided they're gonna give in to Donald Trump, unfortunately. But they're doing that to preserve their own economy. So they're gonna give about $1.3 billion worth of supplies that Donald Trump wants to, uh, quote secure the southern border. A lot of that is coming in the form of drones. So Trump wants to be able to fly drones all over the border to see if there's people coming across. 'cause you know, that's not a total waste of money to catch three people trying to sneak across with a $500 million drone. But Canada says, you know what? We've got some drones. We're gonna give you the drones. So maybe that'll, you know, smooth things over. Maybe we don't get the tariffs. But it doesn't appear that Canada thinks this is going to be enough to stop the tariffs.

So while they are at the negotiating table, they are already giving Trump most of what he wants. Trump isn't backing down and he says, I'm still gonna do it. So the leaders in Canada say, we're gonna do it too. Oh, and guess what? It's gonna hurt you more than it hurts us. Here's something a lot of people don't understand. The United States sends $441 billion worth of goods to Canada every year, 441 billion. That is a lot. However, Canada sends $482 billion worth of goods to the United States. So we are buying more from them than they are buying from us. There is a $41 billion trade

Deficit between the two countries, which means because we buy more than we sell, if there are equal tariffs from both countries, we get screwed more than they get screwed. So still think the tariffs are a good idea. Still think it's a fun thing to experiment with to see if, hey, maybe it's gonna help pay for things. No, we will be screwed. Okay? Canada knows that they have the power in this situation due to the trade deficit, kinda like China does. Nobody's talking about those facts though. Folks, like even the media that's calling him out for the stupidness of the tariffs, they're not mentioning the fact that we pretty much got trade deficits with most of our major trade partners. We're not a very self-sufficient country anymore. We gotta bring in a lot of stuff and we don't send a whole hell of a lot overseas except for military equipment. So we're gonna get screwed. And these countries, Canada specifically, they have no problem screwing us just to let us know we're not as big as big and bad as, uh, Donald Trump would like to think.