Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, has signaled that he believes Canada will reach a deal with President Donald Trump, Richard Stern, the director of budget policy for the Heritage Foundation, told Newsmax Sunday.
Trudeau did so by outlining a timeline for retaliatory tariffs against the United States that included a three-week delay.
"The interesting thing about Trudeau is he is a man who has failed in his own country politically. He's now acting like a man with nothing to lose," Stern said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "But truth be told here, I think it's interesting that he's put a delay of up to three weeks on these tariffs."
Saturday, Trudeau announced that Canada will respond to Trump's action with 25% tariffs against $155 billion in American goods, reported The New York Times.
Canada's move will include immediate tariffs on $30 billion worth of U.S. goods as of Tuesday, followed up on further tariffs on $125 billion in American products in 21 days "to allow Canadian companies and supply chains to seek to find alternatives," he said.
Stern said it's important to keep in mind that Canada, Mexico, and China "have been flooding fentanyl" and other drugs into the United States, and that Canada and Mexico have not been working with the United States to keep their borders closed.
"This isn't about trade," Stern said. "This is about broader geopolitical issues. It is about our national sovereignty, our sovereignty at the border … I think this is a perfectly fine strategy for the U.S. president to use to defend the American people."
He added that Canada's delay in enacting the full tariffs shows "they know that this is more harmful to their economy than it is to ours."
"They know that they want to reach a deal, I think this weekend," said Stern.
Stern also dismissed concerns that Trump's push to remove undocumented immigrants from the United States, thereby forcing companies such as farms to hire American workers, will drive inflation.
"This is a question about who gets the profits from a business," said Stern. "What's happening right now is businesses that take advantage of illegal labor have a trapped workforce who can't compete, who are here under the table, who can't move around, so they are able they are not able to take higher wages from these businesses."
But the businesses pass on the extra profits to shareholders, he said.
"What you will have instead is money that would go to the business owners instead of being paid as a fair wage to workers who now have the ability to shop around for jobs, to command higher wages," said Stern. "If you look at it in a fair, even market, what happens in a free market is there's a certain level of wages and then a much smaller level of profits that go out the door from a business."
And with "trapped labor," businesses have "these kinds of extortive things going on," said Stern, adding the situation to "when we had slavery in the United States."
"[This is] not just getting rid of this abusive practice by employers but getting back to a fair and free market where workers can compete and where those businesses can't unfairly compete by breaking the law," he said.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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