Donald Trump has escalated his trade war with America’s northern neighbor a day after he posed and chatted with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the World Cup final.
The 80-year-old president slapped a 50 percent tariff on a range of Canadian goods—including hockey sticks, wine, cement, and dairy products—on Monday, re-inflaming his economic feud with the U.S.’s second-biggest trading partner.
Trump’s latest tariff escalation followed an outing with Carney, 61, as the two watched the game between Spain and Argentina from a VIP box of New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium and later took part in the medal ceremony.
Trump was greeted by a deafening chorus of jeers as he and Carney walked onto the field following Spain’s victory over Argentina. He then tried to steal the spotlight by refusing to leave the stage after presenting the trophy to Spanish team captain Rodri.
After returning to Joint Base Andrews from the game, Trump told reporters that he had a “good” conversation with Carney and said he complained about the smoke from Canadian wildfires drifting into the U.S.
“I told him, I mean, ‘You got to stop these fires from coming in and, you know, poisoning our air,’” the president said. He added that he has a “good relationship” with Carney before suggesting he could impose more tariffs to punish Canada over the wildfire smoke, a threat he had first made in a Truth Social post on Friday.
However, a senior Trump official told Axios that Monday’s new tariffs were unrelated to Trump’s earlier wildfire tariff threat, while noting that such measures remain on the table.
Instead, the move appears rooted in Trump’s old grievances rather than a broader trade strategy.
A senior Trump official complained to the Financial Times that Canada was one of only two nations, along with China, to retaliate against the tariffs he imposed on a wide range of goods last year with its own duties.
The Trump administration also accused Canada of engaging in unfair trading practices, complaining about tariffs and quotas on U.S. cars, discrimination against American cheese, and some provinces’ decisions to stop buying American alcohol.
Unlike previous rounds of U.S. tariffs, this latest salvo would hit Canadian goods covered by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement—a trade deal Trump himself negotiated and signed into law during his first term, according to FT.
Trump’s new tariffs will take effect in 30 days under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, an obscure law that Congress wrote during the Great Depression. The provision gives the president authority to levy tariffs as high as 50 percent on countries deemed to unfairly target U.S. trade in ways they do not apply to other nations, according to The New York Times.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
