Canada can snort, and snort, but if something is going to tear down the Donald Trump tariffs, it will be the reaction within the United States.
And there are setback signs.
The stock market is changing, the economic feeling is in floors, the approval of the president of the United States is going back and American lawyers are preparing demands.
These factors will probably have more strength in Washington than the $ 155 billion in counter-tarifas threatened by Canada. To put this number in perspective, it is a fraction of what the US market markets lost on Monday.
The president caused an instant faint with several simple words: “Tariffs: all are established,” Trump said Monday, confirming that a 25 percent service in most products would arrive today, and that there was nothing that Canada and Mexico could say to deter it.
The markets responded quickly Pouring all your profits By 2025, with the S&P 500 losing 1.76 percent in the day, which caused hundreds of billions in losses in what the Bloomberg night bulletin called “Trump’s sale.”
The president of the United States, Donald Trump, told White House journalists that 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico will continue on Tuesday. He said there was no “room” for an agreement that would avoid tariffs.
After Trump spoke, the index became negative for the year. Minutes later, the host of Trump’s favorite network, Martha Maccallum of Fox News, said the market was “crazy a little.”
But that modest decrease of a single day of almost two percentage points, and a fall of five points month to month, is no way the only gray cloud in the economic horizon.
The US consumer’s confidence has had its most monthly clearing drop From the pandemic in February. The expense is below. The forecast of the Atlanta Federal Reserve for this quarter has collapsed In negative territory, raising the until now unthinkable possibility of a contraction of GDP.
Meanwhile, his own political honeymoon is in doubt. Trump had enjoyment some of the best approval numbers of their career, but they are marking and sliding underwater, which means the point where they are below their level of disapproval.
“You are obtaining a negative atmosphere,” said Gary Hufbauer, a commercial observer for a long time at the Peterson Institute of International Economics.
The most populous province of the province in Canada was doing everything in his possession on Monday to enliven the flames of economic fear in the United States.
Doug Ford de Ontario was in NBC threatening to close electricity exports to the United States, and minerals for manufacturing and provincial contracts for US companies, which led the host to ask if he has been discussing this with the prime minister.
Ford said he had.
“I will close the manufacture,” he said. “I am going to look absolutely everything … the market will go downhill than the American Bobsled team … it will be an absolute disaster, and everything is due to a person.”
That person, Trump, has based the continental agreement signed, an agreement that is supposed to establish predictable rules for the mostly open trade.
Trump will now ask Canada and Mexico to renegotiate portions of that Canadá-Usxico (Cusma) agreement. The agreement must, by law, be reviewed from 2026 and the administration says Public consultations will begin.
But American commercial lawyers will not only have their eyes in the review of Cusma. They will also be busy driving demands.
The former Energy Executive, Dennis McConaghy, urges Ontario Premier Doug Ford to adopt a careful approach because cutting electricity is a “nuclear ‘option largely. Ford has promised to retaliate if Washington follows his threat rates.
This will be the first time that a president of the United States uses the International Law of Emergency Economic Powers of 1977 to impose tariffs.
The law requires that the president declare a national emergency, which Trump has made, in fact, with the border, folding fentanyl and migration that emergency.
Wait for demands that challenge its use of the law, claiming that it has abused it and its power, with a crushed crisis that involves Canada.
After all, several Trump assistants have greeted Canada’s actions on the border. They even Publish press releases declaring a victory. They are also celebrating a spectacular fall in irregular border crossings.
There could be a “strong argument” that Trump’s claims about the border are a pretext for tariffs, said Dan Ujczo, main lawyer of Thompson Hine, based in Ohio.
UJCZO points out that both the White House and the National Security Department repeatedly said in February that the border was safer in history. “It is difficult to say that Mexico and Canada have not made efforts to ensure the border,” he said.
Do not count on the courts that stop it. The commercial actions of US presidents tend not to be revoked by the judges.
But litigants will try.
An automotive industry official says it is absurd to put tariffs on his sector to relieve an alleged fentanyl crisis.
“A Silverado Chevy built in Oshawa with Pensylvania steel and Texas plastic resins is not a threat to national security within the principle of that legislation,” said Flavio Volpe, president of the Association of Automotive Parties manufacturers, the Canada Auto-Park Lobby Group.
“[Trump] It continues to publicly combine a series of opinions and complaints while justifying the punitive economic measures about us. Surely in an environment of the neutral court, that will be seen as maneuvers of bad faith. “
So now we see Americans. US investors and courts. Despite everything that is discussed about how Canada could fight tariffs, the decisive battle is south of the border.
