Canada will need to accept some level of U.S. tariffs if it hopes to secure a renewed trade pact with Washington, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in an interview with CBC News.
Speaking to two CBC journalists on Capitol Hill shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump’s state of the union address Tuesday night, Greer delivered the clearest signal yet that the Trump administration intends to reshape the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement, or CUSMA, with tariffs built into any future deal.
“When we go to other countries, and we make a deal with them … they agree that we can have a tariff on them,” Greer told CBC News correspondent Katie Simpson.
“If Canada wants to agree that we can have some level of higher tariff on them while they open up their markets to us on things like dairy and other things, then that’s a helpful conversation.”
CUSMA, which replaced NAFTA in 2018, is up for mandatory review this year. Under the agreement, Canada, the United States and Mexico must signal by July 1 whether they plan to extend the deal, renegotiate it or allow it to lapse.
The Trump administration has already imposed tariffs on key Canadian exports, including steel, aluminum, softwood lumber and automobiles. Although the Supreme Court struck down broad-based tariffs last Friday as unconstitutional, Trump moved swiftly to reinstate a 10 per cent levy under different legal authority.
Formal negotiations between Ottawa and Washington have not yet begun. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has indicated talks will start within weeks.
Greer, who is expected to lead U.S. trade talks, argued that the current agreement failed to shift enough industrial production back to the United States.
“If you want to have that deal, you need to have better rules, stricter rules,” he said.
“We don’t want a situation where countries like Vietnam or China can send a bunch of stuff to Canada, do a screwdriver operation and send it across the border into the United States duty-free.”
Greer also criticized Canada’s retaliatory measures against U.S. tariffs and accused Ottawa of resisting American demands.
“Put American wine and spirits back on the shelf; they haven’t done that,” Greer told CBC News producer Sylvia Thomson. “To reopen to America procurement opportunities; they haven’t done that. To give us fair access to their dairy markets; they haven’t done that.
“It’s quite a contrast with Mexico.”
Trump and senior officials have floated multiple options, including renegotiating CUSMA on tougher terms, splitting the pact into separate bilateral deals or abandoning it outright. With the July 1 deadline approaching, Canada now faces mounting pressure to decide whether it will accept a tariff-backed framework or risk a deeper rupture in North American trade.
