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Trump has also volleyed insults in the direction of the Prime Minister’s office and his people. The president has continually referred to Canada as the “51st state” of the U.S. and recently suggested renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America—a tactic he also deployed when negotiating with his southern neighbors in Mexico.

Canadian officials said the U.S. made unacceptable demands and said their counter-tariffs would start Sept. 8.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford said Wednesday he’s willing to cut off electricity exports to the U.S. if the trade war between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and President Trump escalates.

Ford also suggested that Canada should charge the US extra for its oil and gas, as well as electricity and critical minerals, adding that he will be speaking to Carney on ways to "fight back".

Ford said Trump wants to make Canada a vassal state. “He wants to bleed out every single sector and bring them down to the U.S.,” Ford said.

The two countries exchanged about $872 billion in goods and services last year. Canadian crude imports equal nearly 20% of total U.S. petroleum consumption, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, part of the Department of Energy.

With the breakdown threatening to harm one of the world’s largest trading relationships and clouding efforts to renew the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that Trump negotiated during his first term, experts cautioned that there’s still time to pull back from the brink of an even bigger trade war.

Vance asks Mainers to vote Republican — as Trump ups the trade war with Canada Vice President JD Vance's visit marked his second to Maine's 2nd Congressional District in four months.

“Trump is escalating a trade war with Canada for his own vanity,” Michigan’s Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed said on social media, adding that his Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, is a “rubber stamp” for such policies. A third of the state’s exports go north of the border.

The president said Canada taps into the rich American market without buying many American products in return, resulting in a trade deficit that can reach $60 billion.

The auto sector is especially important to Ontario, the center of Canada’s vehicle manufacturing industry. Plants and suppliers in Ontario are tightly integrated with factories in Michigan and other U.S. states, with parts routinely crossing the border multiple times during production.

Tariffs and export controls have been the Trump administration's main economic security tools. Neither are working very well right now.

Ford said he understood that late in the talks, Washington demanded veto power over trade deals Canada pursued with other countries, which would have violated Canadian sovereignty.