LILLEY: Ford strikes a deal, drops surcharge for White House meeting

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Let’s call it an attempt to take the temperature down a bit. Premier Doug Ford agreed on Tuesday not to move forward with a 25% export surcharge on electricity going from Ontario to the United States after a call from Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick.

Instead, Ford and Lutnick will meet in Washington on Thursday alongside the United States Trade Representative and Canada’s federal Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc.

“With any negotiation that we have, there’s a point that both parties are heated, and the temperature needs to come down and I think this is the right decision,” Ford said at Queen’s Park.

Ford implied that the talks on Thursday could mark the beginning of a complete renegotiation of the Canada, United States, Mexico trade agreement which isn’t scheduled to happen until next year. A new deal would be one way to avoid the constant threat of tariffs and Trump, despite having led the last renegotiation, is clearly not happy with the way the deal is working now.

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Trump reacted to the news in Washington while making remarks about a number of issues in front of the TV cameras.

“As you know, there’s a very strong man in Canada who said he was going to charge a surcharge or a tariff on electricity coming into our country … He said he’s not going to do that,” Trump said. “And it would have been a very bad thing if he did, and he’s not going to do that, so I respect that.”

Ford said that it was Lutnick who called him on Tuesday afternoon while the Premier was in the middle of a full court press on U.S. media and speaking to American business leaders. A summit of business leaders, organized by Yale University and featuring top CEOs from across the United States, invited Ford to speak and give his views on the trade war.

Over the past several days, Ford has been interviewed by ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, the Atlantic, Bloomberg, the Washington Post and of course, Trump’s favourite news outlet, Fox News, which has featured him several times.

“What I’m doing the American media for is to inform the American people,” Ford said when asked about his strategy.

Ford said the American public needs to hear the full story, including the impact of tariffs on inflation. Over the last week, Ford had said he would not back down until there were no tariffs at all. Tuesday, he said he believes that pausing the electricity surcharge was the right move.

“It’s called an olive branch. When you’re negotiating with someone, they call you and they hand over an olive branch, the worst thing I can do as Premier of Ontario is ignore them hang up the phone,” Ford said.

In every media interview Ford has given over the last few days, he has noted how the tariff threats have triggered uncertainty in the American economy and in North American stock markets. As he announced the pause, Ford said it’s better to get to the table now than deal with even greater uncertainty.

“All of you folks have seen how President Trump has changed things on a daily basis. I don’t want to wait until April 2. God only knows what would happen from now until April 2. We need to get to the table as quickly as possible,” Ford said.

If talks fail, or if Trump increases tariffs going forward, Ford said that he won’t hesitate to impose the electricity surcharge. Given that Ontario powers 1.5 million American homes across New York State, Michigan and Minnesota, the surcharge would have cost roughly $400,000 per day.

As for American booze, it remains off the shelves at the LCBO for the foreseeable future.