Abdul El-Sayed wants to be elected this fall as the next U.S. Senator for Michigan.
On Saturday, the Democratic candidate accused his Republican opponent of blindly supporting U.S. President Donald Trump and his new 50 per cent tariffs on Canada, which he said would cost Michigan families thousands of dollars a year.
“He’s a sock puppet who will do whatever Trump wants,” El-Sayed tweeted of Mike Rogers, a former FBI special agent, “no matter what it costs you.”
Despite being its northern neighbour and largest trading partner, Canada has historically been a political afterthought in American political campaigns.
That mostly holds true heading into this November’s midterm elections, which will pick state governors and decide which party — Republican or Democrat — controls the U.S. Congress.
But states such as Michigan, Maine, Iowa, Arkansas, Ohio and Texas are thought this year to be among Democrats’ best hopes of winning control of the Republican-dominated Senate and blocking Trump’s agenda.
And in some of those races, where grocery and gas prices and the cost of living are top-of-mind issues for voters, Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney and the escalating tariff war now have rare political currency.
Pushing Canada’s tariff fight onto the U.S. political agenda is a tactic endorsed by Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who knows a thing or two about getting under Trump’s thin skin. In an Aug. 17 letter to Carney — released on Saturday — he urged the prime minister to “consider additional retaliatory tariffs on imports from politically significant states to the current administration’s base of support.”
“Products from these states should face the full force of Canada’s response,” Ford wrote.
The key is to make the trade fight felt south of the border, and make it clear to midterm election voters that tariffs end up raising the price tag for some of their most essential items.
That message is being heard loudest along the U.S. border states.
Jocelyn Benson, who is running to be the next governor of Michigan in November, charged on Saturday that Trump’s 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods were “man-made price hikes courtesy of John James (her Republican opponent) and Donald Trump.”
“Let’s call this what it is,” she wrote on social media. “The John James tax on your small businesses, your gas prices, and your groceries.”
If there is less debate in Maine midterm races, it is only because nearly every candidate, regardless of party affiliation, is dead set against a tariff war with Canada.
Republican Sen. Susan Collins, a longtime tariff critic, urged Trump on Saturday to “consider the negative impact tariffs will have on Maine businesses, communities and families.”
It also includes her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, who in 1998 organized a blockade of the Canada-U.S. border to draw attention to the use by American logging companies of cheaper Canadian labour.
He said that wood, lobster and blueberries, among other products, relied on access to Canadian customers, while Maine’s farmers rely on Canadian fertilizer.
Escalating tariffs are “making it harder for people in Maine,” he told reporters Saturday.
In the race to be the next Maine governor, there is also bipartisan opposition to Trump’s tariffs on Canada, including from Republican candidate Bobby Charles.
A former proponent of tariffs on Canada, Charles said last month in a radio interview that he would tell Trump directly that there should be “waivers on the tariffs” to protect the state’s businesses and supply chains.
In a campaign statement, he added that Maine’s US$6 billion trading relationship had fallen 20 per cent due to tariffs, and that Canadian visitors to Maine had dropped to four per cent of the state’s overall tourism from seven per cent.
“We need to be able to have a free, clear, trusting, consistent, sustained trading relationship with Canada,” Charles said in July.
The comments came before Trump’s initial threat of 50 per cent tariffs on Canada was made, which Prime Minister Mark Carney said acted as “a catalyst for more intensive negotiations.”
Those trade talks broke down last Friday night over what Carney described as the refusal to lower tariff rates on Canadian components in trucks as well as attempts to put restrictions on trade deals Canada could sign with other countries, something the prime minister said was “unacceptable.”
“You’re at war when you get attacked,” Carney told reporters. “We got attacked.”
Trump has been uncharacteristically subdued in his public response, writing on social media Sunday morning that “Canada wants the benefits of being a state without being one.”
But there are signs that the Trump administration is girding for an expanded trade battle with Canada, which could include Canadian counter-tariffs that would take effect in early September.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned that a Canada-U.S. trade war would be “devastating” for Carney.
“It’s a country that doesn’t have a military. It’s a country that has a single-payer health care system that’s failing. They have record-high euthanasia rates. To think that they’re going to go to war with Donald Trump and actually win that war with the U.S. — I think it’s foolish on their part,” he told Fox News Sunday.
“The president’s calling them out. I think you’re going to see Mark Carney come to the table very, very quickly, because it’s going to be devastating for his country.”
