Insiders Say Prospect of Lifting Section 232 in NAFTA Region Looking More Remote
Canada's top diplomat in Detroit, Consul General Joe Comartin, said the Canadians used to get assurances, whether from politicians or the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, that the tariffs on its steel and aluminum exports were going to come off soon. "We're not even getting those assurances anymore," he told International Trade Today March 27 in an interview. "We're just not seeing any movement on this side on the tariffs."
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Comartin said Canada spent more money on combating transshipment of steel through Canada in order to avoid tariffs, and since that effort began, it hasn't gotten any complaints from U.S. customs officials that a bad shipment got through. He said maybe eight years ago, when he was a member of Parliament, he did see coils of steel parked beside the Detroit River in Windsor, and he was told they had come from India or Brazil. "I was told almost all of that was going into the United States," he said. But he thinks that there have been no serious attempts at tariff circumvention through Canada since the Section 232 tariffs began.
Comartin said the Canadian Parliament will not begin debating the passage of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement, as Canada calls the revised NAFTA, until the tariffs are lifted. Quotas are out of the question, he said. The Parliament will adjourn in June, and it will require three months to get the agreement through the committee process and get a floor vote, he said, so he's concerned that there will not be enough time.
Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has been making the same point to the Trump administration. In a conversation with reporters at his office on March 27, he relayed how that was received at the White House two weeks ago. He said all the Republican senators there said the tariffs are a barrier to getting the USMCA (the U.S.' new NAFTA moniker) passed.
"The president says we got a darned good agreement. So then why wouldn't the tariffs come off?" he said someone asked. "Well, [trade adviser] Peter Navarro interrupts, 'We can't conflate the tariffs with the agreement.'
"And I said, 'What do you mean you can't conflate them? You conflated them when you started this whole process.'
"And then [USTR Robert] Lighthizer said, 'Well, we're going to negotiate for quotas.' Well, negotiate for quotas? Some people say that's worse than the tariffs. So I said to the president, 'Don't you think the tariffs ought to come off?'" He said Trump answered: "No."