The Ford Trump tariff response has generated considerable heat, but the more interesting question is whether the rhetoric is backed by the kind of economic action that would actually change the calculus in Washington. Premier Doug Ford’s Monday morning declaration that Trump ‘can kiss my ass’ made headlines; the structural leverage Canada holds over the United States has received rather less attention.
Trump posted to Truth Social on 24 August 2026, threatening to raise tariffs on all cars, trucks, automotive parts, and steel to 50 per cent effective 1 January 2027. The stated rationale was a trade deficit he put at $60 billion, driven, he claimed, by ‘ridiculously high tariffs’ on American farm products. That framing has a well-documented problem: the deficit is almost entirely an energy story. Excluding oil, the United States runs a goods trade surplus with Canada. The oil balance alone accounts for more than the total deficit figure Trump cites.
Ford’s threat to tax electricity exports
Ford told CTV News host Bill Carroll he is considering placing an export tariff on electricity to make the US ‘feel the pain,’ and urged other premiers to join the fight. ‘I can’t be standing alone on this,’ he said. ‘Every single province, or majority of them, deliver electricity down to the U.S. Alberta delivers 4.1 million barrels of oil down in the U.S.’ The logic is straightforward: Canada possesses several goods the US economy is structurally dependent on, and those goods run in one direction.
British Columbia Premier David Eby made the same point from a different angle on CNN, arguing that Canada’s trade surplus is ‘largely driven by energy exports’ and that the tariffs would push up the cost of building materials, cut flowers, and fishing equipment for American consumers. ‘The rest of the world will say enough,’ he said. ‘Hitting your number one customer with a 50 per cent tariff and expecting that we wouldn’t do the same is bizarre.’
Former prime minister Jean Chretien was more specific, calling for an export tax on energy, oil, natural gas, and potash. ‘The advantage of an export tax is it’s not us who pays, it’s the Americans,’ he told Téléquébec. The observation is arithmetically correct. An export tax on Canadian oil does not raise prices in Canada; it raises the price American refiners pay, which is then passed to American consumers.
What Howard Lutnick’s position reveals about the endgame
The more uncomfortable read on this dispute is not that it is a negotiating tactic. The Wall Street Journal reported that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose department administers the tariffs, has explicitly said he wants automotive supply chains relocated to the United States. A 50 per cent levy could, if sustained, push automakers to close Canadian factories, particularly if the US eliminates tariff rebate programmes tied to the use of US-made parts. Auto parts routinely cross the US, Mexican, and Canadian borders multiple times before final assembly.
International trade lawyer Ljiljana Stanić of McCarthy Tétrault said the collapse of trade talks was ‘unexpected’ and that the US appeared to be pursuing ‘fortress North America,’ by which she meant demanding Canada match Washington’s tariffs on third countries without offering free trade in return. She added that ‘trade disputes are easy to start but difficult to contain,’ and described the situation as a tipping point. If the US goal is genuinely full supply-chain repatriation, there is no negotiated outcome that satisfies it short of Canada surrendering its manufacturing base.
That context makes the ‘give Trump what he wants immediately’ argument harder to dismiss than it sounds. If further concessions simply invite further demands, the asymmetry of the current approach becomes a liability rather than a virtue.
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is calling on Prime Minister Mark Carney to reconvene Parliament following Carney’s decision to recall Canadian negotiators from Washington. Eastern premiers, meanwhile, are urging consumers to buy local. Quebec’s Christine Frechette said the tariffs will affect approximately $7.7 billion of provincial exports. A recent report cited by Ontario coverage suggests around 87,000 Canadian jobs could be at risk across the trade dispute.
Ford has called on all provinces to act. Whether the Ford Trump tariff response translates into co-ordinated economic pressure, or remains a series of strongly worded statements, will determine whether Canada’s considerable leverage is actually deployed before the 1 January 2027 deadline arrives.
