Prime Minister Mark Carney is set to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington on Tuesday as trade negotiations continue and Ottawa looks for an off-ramp from tariffs hammering the Canadian steel, aluminum and automobile industries.
Carney will travel to the United States capital city Monday ahead of the meeting. It will be his second visit to the White House since he became prime minister.
The Prime Minister’s Office said in a news release Carney’s visit will focus on shared priorities in a new economic and security relationship between Canada and the United States.
Canadian officials were cycling through Washington ahead of Trump’s declared August deadline for a trade deal. No such deal materialized and the president increased tariffs on Canada to 35 per cent.
Those duties do not apply to goods compliant under the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement on trade, also called CUSMA. Carney has said that carveout puts Canada in a better position than most nations — including those that did end up making deals with the Trump administration.
Carney’s government has since focused on finding a way to alleviate the pressures from Trump’s separate tariffs on steel, aluminum, automobiles and copper.
The Trump administration is also increasing duties on lumber later this month.
It’s not clear whether any deals will be announced while Carney is in Washington. Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc — the key federal official on the Canada-U.S. trade file — said Thursday he hopes to make progress on one-off, sector-specific tariff deals with the U.S. before a CUSMA review begins next year.
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LeBlanc told parliamentary hearings in Ottawa that “nobody has yet suggested” Ottawa should fold the sector-specific talks into the broader CUSMA review.
He told a Senate foreign affairs committee hearing that Canada is still in discussions on dropping the sector-specific tariffs putting pressure on Canadian industries, and he does not see “a dead end in those conversations.”
LeBlanc said “time will tell us if my optimism is misplaced.”
Canada and the U.S. separately launched CUSMA consultations last month.
Members of Trump’s cabinet have hinted that sector-specific deals could be struck. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested in August there is negotiating room on aluminum tariffs.
Bessent told CNBC that Ford trucks use a lot of aluminum and “we will be negotiating with Canada on those.”
The United States relies heavily on aluminum imports and doesn’t have the capacity domestically to replace what it buys from Canada.
Trump, however, has indicated he is still committed to his automobile and steel tariffs, and has claimed repeatedly that the United States doesn’t need anything from Canada.
Carney’s Tuesday meeting will take place after Trump returned to his “51st state” rhetoric about Canada during an unprecedented speech to top military leaders on Tuesday.
The president was speaking about his “Golden Dome” missile defence plans in front of military officials who had been abruptly summoned from their postings around the world to Quantico, near Washington.
“Canada called me a couple of weeks ago, they want to be part of it, to which I said, ‘Well, why don’t you just join our country. You become 51 — become the 51st state — and you get it for free,’” Trump told the assembled officials.
Trump’s repeated annexation threats were a key test for the prime minister during their first meeting in the Oval Office in May. Carney told the president in public and private that Canada will never become a U.S. state.
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