‘It’s not our choice’: Trudeau says Canada will respond ‘unequivocally’ to Trump tariffs despite threat of stacked levies on aluminum

PM Justin Trudeau says Ukraine will lead discussions on peace and sovereignty.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reiterated that Canada’s response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs will be “unequivocal,” regardless of how significant the American levies turn out to be.

“Canada will respond as appropriate in a calibrated but extremely strong way, regardless of what the U.S. moves forward with,” Trudeau told reporters on Wednesday, on the last day of a friend-shoring trip to meet with European allies.

“We don’t want to be in a trade dispute,” he also said, adding he believes the “best thing” would be to work with the Americans on other international trade issues, citing work with non-market economies, addressing authoritarian economies, and securing supply chains, as examples.

But, Trudeau said, if those efforts must be “put on pause” during a trade war with the U.S., so be it.

“It’s not our choice,” Trudeau also said. “We don’t want to be doing that, but we will.”

Trump’s tariffs on Canadian imports — 25 per cent on all goods and 10 per cent on energy, imposed by an executive order signed Feb. 1 — have been paused for 30 days pending progress on border security. The president, meanwhile, also announced this week he’ll impose a 25 per cent tariff on all steel and aluminum imports, “without exceptions or exemptions,” starting March 12.

Those levies will be stacked, for a 50 per cent total tariff on steel and aluminum, according to a White House official who confirmed the plan Tuesday on background to The Canadian Press.

In response to Trump’s initial tariff threat, on Feb. 1 Trudeau announced Canada’s countermeasures will include immediate tariffs on $30 billion worth of goods, followed by further tariffs on $125 billion worth of American products three weeks later, to allow Canadian companies and supply chains to find alternatives.

Facing new trade uncertainty, Trudeau was in Brussels Wednesday for a meeting with European allies, namely European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, European Council President Antonio Costa, and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.

“This visit was another reminder of the importance of these partnerships, of international institutions, that in the past decades have made the difference between prosperity and poverty, between war and peace,” Trudeau said. “We cannot take these institutions for granted. We must renew and deepen our engagement towards them. That’s what we’re doing here today.”

“In turbulent times, we all need reliable, trustworthy partners, and that’s what Canada is,” Trudeau also said. “That’s who Canadians are.”

The European Union is Canada’s second-largest trading partner, behind the United States. The trade agreement between the two, known as CETA, was signed in 2016 and has been in place since 2017, but not all member countries have ratified the deal.

Costa, during brief remarks with Trudeau and von der Leyen on Wednesday, told reporters that Canada and the EU are proof that “trade agreements are clearly better than trade tariffs.”

The prime minister’s one-day stop in Brussels comes on the heels of his trip to France for an Artificial Intelligence Action Summit.

U.S. annexation of Canada ‘never going to happen’: Trudeau

While laying out his plans for punishing tariffs on Canadian imports, the U.S. president has also repeatedly doubled down on his comments about annexing Canada, including saying early last month he’d use “economic force” to do so.

On Friday, a source told CTV News that Trudeau told a crowd of business leaders at a summit in Toronto that Trump’s threat to make Canada the 51st state is a “real thing,” in part to gain access to Canada’s critical minerals. The comments were made after media had been asked to leave the room.

Trump confirmed that notion in an interview with Fox News on Sunday, when asked directly about Trudeau’s comments about the annexation threat being real.

“Let’s be very clear: conversations around a 51st state are a non-starter,” Trudeau said. “It’s never going to happen, but we have to take seriously what the president is saying and fold that into our thinking as we continue to stand up for Canada.”

Another point of contention in the bilateral relationship has been Canada’s spending commitment to the larger NATO alliance, of which both Canada and the U.S. are a part.

Canada has long been criticized for failing to meet its decade-old commitment to spend two per cent of its GDP on defence. Trudeau has since pledged to meet the target by 2032, eight years after the initially agreed-upon deadline.

Trump’s re-election in the United States, however, has added a new sense of urgency, considering the commander-in-chief’s at-times perilous comments about NATO, and recent calls for members of the alliance to increase the spending target from two per cent, to five per cent.

Speaking to the media on board Air Force One on Sunday, Trump also called out Canada’s defence spending, saying “they don’t pay their share of military.”

“Donald Trump has always been someone who has challenged ways of doing things or various conventions around what gets negotiated, or what gets said about one country or another,” Trudeau said on Wednesday, when asked whether Trump puts NATO’s future at risk, especially in light of the president’s threats against the sovereignty of an alliance member.

“I think we need to focus on the core of the issue, which is we need to be able to be there to defend our sovereignty, defend our democracies and support our partners,” Trudeau added. “That’s what we’re all committed to.”

Trudeau currently has no plans to meet with Trump in D.C.

Despite the escalating trade dispute between Canada and the U.S., Trudeau told reporters in Brussels he currently has no trip on the books to meet with Trump.

The prime minister said that while he and Trump have “had many different conversations over the past many, many months,” and that his government will “continue to engage at all levels,” with the U.S. administration, he does not personally have plans to go to Washington.

Trudeau did say however that he had a “quick-greeting exchange” with U.S. Vice-President JD Vance in Paris earlier this week, during which he highlighted the importance and interconnectedness of aluminum trade between Canada and the United States.

Canada’s premiers are currently on a trade mission to Washington, D.C. to meet with industry leaders and lawmakers.

CTV News has confirmed that 12 of them — aside from P.E.I. Premier Dennis King who cut his trip short — are set to meet with senior advisors to the president in the White House this afternoon.

With files from CTV News’ Rachel Aiello