A fresh wave of United States tariffs on Canadian goods took effect at midnight after trade negotiations between the two countries broke down minutes before a Friday night deadline, with Ottawa saying it will retaliate in kind.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced he was suspending the talks and would impose reciprocal duties on American goods on a “dollar for dollar” basis.
“As a result, this evening, I have decided to suspend trade negotiations with the U.S. and have directed negotiators to return to Ottawa,” Carney said, according to Ada Derana.
He said “important progress” had been made but that it was “not enough to meet our objectives for Canadians”, adding that “last-minute changes in the US proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal”.
What the tariffs cover
The levies are set at 50% and apply to roughly $20 billion (C$28 billion) worth of Canadian goods, Ada Derana and the Daily Mirror reported.
Negotiators had been in intensive talks since July, after President Donald Trump threatened the duties with a deadline of 19 August. Trump paused the measure earlier in the week, saying the two sides were close to a deal he described as “very good” for both countries, and at one point declared: “We’ve come to a deal with Canada” — though he added it was “still subject to finalization of documents.”
Washington’s response
US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Canada had “declined to finalize the trade deal under the terms agreed earlier this week.”
“Despite the U.S. offer to Canada to receive the best treatment of any major exporter to our market, new demands and walk backs of other commitments by Canada have upended the careful balance reached in the past days,” Greer said in a statement posted on X.
Ada Derana carried the story as BBC copy and the Daily Mirror ran a CNN report; both are consistent on the sequence of events and the headline figures. Hiru News, reporting in Sinhala, gave the value of the affected goods as close to $28 billion — a figure that appears to convert the Canadian dollar amount rather than the US dollar one.
