Dorothy

In another post midday Wednesday, Carney said the two sides are "moving towards an agreement that reinforces that Canadian advantage, including by securing the best terms in each of Canada's most important strategic sectors and providing greater certainty about our future trading relationship."

"We've come to a deal with Canada" after a "very good conversation" with Carney, Trump told reporters while touring construction projects on the White House grounds.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and U.S. officials acknowledged intense, last-minute talks before the deadline. The White House declined to comment at the time of publication.

Dominic LeBlanc, Canada’s minister for U.S. trade, met with Greer on Monday. He was tight-lipped afterward.

Canada’s supply management system, which implements limits on imports, has been a source of contention for the U.S. administration.

New leverage to renegotiate USMCA The U.S. is renegotiating a North American trade pact - the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement - that Trump strong-armed America’s neighbors into accepting in his first term. The threat of Section 338 tariffs gives the United States leverage to seek fresh concessions from Ottawa.

Both countries had reason to step back from the brink. Nearly 72% of Canada’s goods exports last year went to the United States. And the Trump administration would be taking a risk by imposing a hefty new tariff - paid by U.S. importers who try to pass along the cost to consumers via higher prices - ahead of November’s midterm elections. U.S. voters are already frustrated with the high cost of living.

But the political impact would likely have been bigger than the economic one. Canada had threatened to retaliate against any new tariffs with levies of its own, aggravating a trade fight between countries that sold each other $880 billion worth of goods and services last year.

Trump has made tariffs the centerpiece of his second-term economic agenda. Last year, he imposed double-digit import taxes on almost every country, justifying them by declaring the longstanding U.S. trade deficit a national emergency. The Supreme Court in February ruled that he’d overstepped his authority, striking down those tariffs and setting the stage for the federal government to pay refunds to importers.

Nearly a century ago, with the U.S. and world economies in collapse, Congress passed the 1930 tariff law, imposing hefty taxes on imports from around the world. Known as the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, for their congressional sponsors, they are notorious among economists and historians for limiting world commerce and making the Great Depression worse.