Ontario Premier Doug Ford renewed a call to buy “Canadian-made everything” to heap pressure on the US to negotiate a trade deal and lift tariffs.
Ford, who leads Canada’s biggest province and is hosting a meeting of premiers this week, said the country should lean into its status as America’s biggest customer. Prime Minister Mark Carney will make an appearance at the conference on Tuesday for a huddle with the provincial leaders.
Carney is sending Dominic LeBlanc, the minister responsible for Canada-US trade, to Washington this week to negotiate with US President Donald Trump’s administration, which has threatened a 35% tariff on some Canadian goods if there’s no deal by Trump’s Aug. 1 deadline. But the president and his officials have sent mixed signals about whether they want to sign agreements or simply proceed with unilateral tariff rates on trading partners.
“We’re encouraging all provinces and territories: start buying Canadian-made vehicles, start buying Canadian-made everything — that will hurt more than anything at all,” Ford told reporters on Monday as he arrived at Deerhurst Resort near Huntsville, a picturesque town at the heart of Ontario’s Muskoka region.
Canadians say they’re ramping up their boycott of US travel and products in response to the tariffs, according to the Bank of Canada’s quarterly survey of households released Monday. About 55% of respondents said they’re spending less on vacations to US destinations, and roughly 63% said they’re pulling back on purchases of American goods.
“We’re their number one customer. We buy more products from the US than Japan, China, Korea, the UK and France combined. So we are an economic powerhouse and we don’t have to take a back seat to anyone,” he said, adding he wants his province to begin making products such as steel beams used in construction and aluminum cans for soda and beer.
Trump hiked tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum imports to 50% in June. Canada’s steel industry has already cut jobs and seen shipments slashed. Carney’s government announced a plan last week to curb imports of foreign steel to help domestic producers — though one influential steel executive said it doesn’t go nearly far enough.
Ford’s government pledged C$1.3 billion ($950 million) in May to help manufacturers by beefing up a tax credit for Ontario-made products. The government says about 830,000 people in the province work in manufacturing, which represents about 10% of jobs.
Canada’s premiers have largely struck a united front in the face of Trump’s trade war, and their summer retreat is set to be dominated by discussions on how to increase trade between the provinces and advance major infrastructure projects, such as ports, to bolster the country’s economic independence.
Carney and some provincial leaders appeared resigned to at least some level of tariffs on Canadian shipments to the US, despite the existing trade accord that Trump signed in his first term that largely allows tariff-free trade between the US, Mexico and Canada. The prime minister said last week there’s little evidence Trump will cut a deal that completely drops tariffs.
Arriving at the resort on Monday, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said she hopes sector-specific tariffs will be minimized as much as possible, while Quebec’s Francois Legault said it’s too soon to say whether it’s inevitable that some tariffs remain.
“We’ll see what we can get on August 1st. Of course, the ideal situation would be no tariffs,” Legault told reporters. Whatever the agreement is, he said, “we need to have assurance that we’ll keep this agreement for three, five years. We need to have an economy where the companies know what’s happening in six months and 12 months from now.”
