Joly off to Washington to talk tariffs with Rubio as Trump floats 5% target for NATO

OTTAWA — Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly will press Canada’s case against damaging tariffs with the new U.S. secretary of state in Washington next week, after Trump repeated a demand Thursday for allies to vastly increase their military spending.

Trump is threatening to impose 25 per cent across-the-board tariffs on imports from Canada starting on Feb. 1. Joly said things are still in flux because Trump hasn’t confirmed his new commerce secretary.

“There will be lots of rhetoric,” Joly told reporters on Parliament Hill on Thursday.

“We will hear a lot of different versions coming from south of the border. We need to put our head down, we need to be united and we need to defend Canadian jobs.”

Joly spoke with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio for half an hour by phone Wednesday and will meet with him in person next week. She said Rubio is a “good interlocutor” and she’s had “constructive” discussions with him, including when they met last December before his formal confirmation.

“He understands that not only this will have an impact on Americans, but this will have an impact on how the U.S. engages in the world, and that will have an impact geopolitically,” she said in reference to the tariff threat.

“I also talked about the importance of standing up against China together. And Rubio himself has been very hawkish against China.”

Joly said she will meet with “other key Republican senators” during her fifth visit to the U.S. since last November’s presidential election. She said Canada will participate in Trump’s planned review of trading practices.

She called for unity on Canada’s trade strategy. The premiers of Alberta, Quebec and Saskatchewan have pushed back on Ottawa for floating the idea of imposing dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs and cutting off energy exports.

“Alberta jobs are important as Ontario jobs, as Quebec jobs. It’s not a competition,” Joly said.

“We can all work together to make sure that, ultimately, we face together this existential threat against our economy.”

Also on Thursday, Trump repeated his previous calls for NATO military allies like Canada to spend five per cent of their GDP on defence — a target that no NATO country currently meets.

In his speech to the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Trump also lamented the United States’ “tremendous deficit with Canada” in trade.

“Canada has been very tough to deal with over the years, and it’s not fair,” he said, adding that the U.S. doesn’t need Canadian commodities.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded by citing Ottawa’s planned increases to military spending and said Canada is a partner to the U.S. in an unstable world.

He said Trump’s vision for an economic boom in the U.S. will require “more of the things that Canada is already sending” it, such as energy, minerals and lumber — all of which Ottawa could block or make more expensive in response to U.S. tariffs.

“Canada will have a strong, robust response, because we don’t want this, but we will respond if necessary,” Trudeau said.

He said the point of Canada’s tariff strategy is “not to figure out how to manage these tariffs and live with them over the long term, but to figure out how to get them removed as quickly as possible.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 23, 2025.

Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press