LILLEY: Don't expect a trade deal with Trump as deadline looms

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Canada’s top officials were in Washington on Wednesday, but don’t expect a deal to stop new tariffs by Friday. It hasn’t been a good few days for Canada on the trade negotiation front.

Donald Trump was in Scotland over the past few days brokering deals with the European Union and solidifying his agreement with Britain. His top trade advisor, Jamieson Greer, spent the last few days in Sweden negotiating with Chinese officials.

Meanwhile, Mark Carney was in New Brunswick celebrating Acadian heritage and then in Prince Edward Island announcing that the toll to take the bridge to the island would drop from $50 to $20.

It’s not quite the same as setting up an international trade deal, is it?

Donald Trump has said that if he doesn’t have a new trade deal with Canada by Aug. 1, then we will face a new 35% tariff. What that means and how it will be applied given the existing CUSMA trade deal remains to be seen, but it won’t be good for Canada’s economy.

We should be doing everything we can to avoid new tariffs. We already have the 50% tariffs on steel and aluminum; we have the increased softwood lumber tariffs of 20.56% — up from 14.54% just a few months ago.

To try and stop this onslaught of new tariffs, Dominic LeBlanc, the minister in charge of the Canada-U.S. trade file was in Washington on Wednesday, as was Prime Minister Mark Carney’s chief of staff, Marc-Andre Blanchard.

Unfortunately, they were not meeting with top officials in the Trump administration because those officials, like Greer, were busy meeting with officials from other countries.

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There is an attempt to downplay the idea that Canada will get a deal before Aug. 1 and if we do get a deal, that it won’t include some kind of baseline tariff, such as 10% or less.

“It’s an uphill push and having to deal with inconsistent asks from the other side,” is how one Canadian official described the ongoing talks.

While the Americans are seen as changing targets and what they are asking for, the American side says that Canada isn’t negotiating in good faith. From the outside, it’s difficult to know what is truly happening.

Each side has their own trade irritants with the other and neither side appears to be willing to come to a deal.

Meanwhile, Mexico is close to a deal with Trump. Unlike Canada, Mexico has never raised a retaliatory tariff; they threatened, but didn’t execute.

Now, just as in 2017, Mexico may get a deal with Trump while Canada is frozen out.

Goldy Hyder, the President and CEO of the Business Council of Canada, landed in Washington for meetings midday on Wednesday. As he headed to have discussions with top American officials, he said that Canada may not be able to escape a deal that doesn’t involve tariffs on some level.

“It’s a game of relativity, we just have to better relative to others,” Hyder said.

He noted Britain having a deal with 10% tariffs, saying that was better than the 15% that the European Union had agreed to — and hoped Canada could do even better.

Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested just over a week ago that a trade deal with Canada might involve no tariffs, if we opened our markets to the Americans. What that meant and what the price would be has never been disclosed by the American or Canadian side.

Bottom line, Canadian workers and Canadian employers are going to be sitting and wondering how things will go over the next few days and whether what is decided between Ottawa and Washington results in job losses.

Uncertainty is the worst for the business sector; right now, that is all we have.