In an interview on Power & Politics, (David Paterson, Ontario’s representative in Washington) told host David Cochrane that the Canadians and Americans had a 90-minute meeting and the first half-hour was “a master class” from Lutnick in breaking down the U.S. position on tariffs.
The focus of the U.S. government is dealing with its yearly deficit in federal spending, Paterson said. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the federal government ran a $1.83 trillion US deficit in the 2024 fiscal year.
There are three ways the U.S. government is working to cut down that deficit, Paterson added.
The first is a major budget resolution that calls for billions of dollars in tax cuts, and the second is slashing the size of government through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. The third is tariffs, which are meant to be a new revenue source and attract investment into the United States.
It’s probably going to be cheaper for manufacturing to completely remove themselves from the USSA and avoid doing any business with it at all.
There will be an amount of businesses and industries that are either already American and others who make a calculation that its more profitable to pay tribute to Trump and consolidate in the US. There will be a whole ton more that make another calculation - that paying tribute to Trump is unacceptable, that there’s a whole world out there to trade with, make products for, and work with. If anyone has been to other parts of the world, Asia or the Middle East, Lat Am and Europe (obviously, CANZUK and the rest of the Commonwealth as well), those regions are absolutely MASSIVE and HUGE and have loads and loads of companies, businesses and industries that have the ability to do well, working around the USA - which is incredibly unstable, unpredictable and unreliable. There will be lots of workarounds. Canada needs to be in the workaround camp. We’ll deal with the US, but generally minimize our exposure to them, while standing up for ourselves and be much more open to the rest of the world. Which is not a bad thing at all IMO. If we simultaneously also build up our own infrastructure, highspeed rail across the entire country (YES! Not just the corridor in southern Ontario to Quebec), pipelines going east-west, build up our ports evne more in Halifax and Vancouver, and we stick to Canadian companies hiring Canadian workers, using Canadian resources, to build Canadian infrastructure - I do not think we will be in bad shape at all.