President Donald Trump’s tariff threats against Canada are causing that country to more seriously consider ways to diversify its economy away from the United States, including building out more infrastructure to export fossil fuels from the Canadian coast to other countries, a senior Canadian government official said Tuesday.
“Certainly, it’s a conversation that’s probably more top of mind than it was a few weeks ago,” Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada’s minister of energy and natural resources, said when asked if Trump’s tariff strategy was making Canadian officials weigh whether to reduce its exposure to the U.S. marketplace. Wilkinson made the statement in response to a question from POLITICO after speaking at a Washington gathering of think tank Atlantic Council on how Canada was approaching its energy policy amid the current trade tensions with the United States.
The two countries have significant trade ties and have been free trade partners for more than a decade, a cozy relationship that has been rocked by the Trump administration’s plan to impose a 25 percent tariff on many imports of Canadian goods and a 10 percent tax on the millions of barrels a day of oil flowing from Canada to refineries in the U.S. Midwest.
“We have had a historic economic relationship with the United States where Canadians were of the view — and until recently Americans I think were of the view — that that was all positive and that more infrastructure to the United States was just a positive thing to do,” Wilkinson said. “There would never be a threat to Canada … around the imposition of tariffs. Obviously, [Trump’s tariffs threats] have changed how people think about it a little bit, which is maybe it’s a vulnerability.”
