Even the advocates are urging restraint.
Canada-U.S. trade tensions reached a new pitch when U.S. President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders banning certain Canadian alcoholic beverages and dairy products from entering the United States. Trump framed the move as a direct response to Canadian retaliatory tariffs that had just taken effect on nearly $28 billion worth of U.S. imports — the latest exchange in a tit-for-tat escalation that has rattled supply chains and strained one of the world’s most integrated economic relationships.
Into that charged atmosphere stepped Charles Benoit, trade counsel for the Washington-based Coalition for a Prosperous America, a group that has long championed tariffs and domestic industrial protection. Benoit is not a free-trader. He believes home-market protection, not open markets, ultimately serves both the United States and Canada. That is precisely what makes his current position striking: he is calling on both governments to unilaterally drop their retaliatory measures.
“The tariff war is bad,” Benoit said plainly. “We do not support retaliation. We don’t support chasing exports.” His argument is not that tariffs themselves are wrong, but that the current spiral of counter-measures serves no one’s industrial interests — least of all the sectors both countries say they want to protect.
Benoit sees the outlines of a workable deal already visible in recent public statements. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, in a widely noted interview with CBC, signalled that Washington’s core demand centres on the harmonization of steel, aluminum, and automotive tariffs. Prime Minister Mark Carney, for his part, has framed Canada’s position around preserving the country’s ability to pursue other trade agreements — a goal that, Benoit suggests, actually aligns with what Greer described. “Both sides should just unilaterally decide that they’re above this mess,” he said, “and drop retaliatory actions.”
On the automotive file, Benoit pointed to the recent U.S.-U.K. framework as a model worth considering — a quota-based arrangement on vehicles rather than a blanket tariff, which he described as “reasonable for both countries.” On dairy, however, he urged Canada to hold firm, treating each product category on its own terms rather than bundling everything into a single negotiating package.
Aluminum is where Benoit’s analysis cuts deepest — and where it carries the most direct relevance for Canadian provinces. He argued that the United States should abolish its tariff on primary aluminum altogether, on the grounds that domestic smelting capacity cannot be rebuilt through tariffs alone. What actually drives competitive aluminum production, he said, is long-term government power agreements. He pointed to the history: in the 1940s, the U.S. federal government built ten smelters, which eventually became Reynolds Aluminum and Kaiser Aluminum. Without that kind of state commitment, the tariff accomplishes little. The Massena smelter in New York, he noted, survives today only because it receives a public-power deal from the New York Power Authority.
His example of what works? Quebec. Because the province owns Hydro-Québec, it can offer the kind of long-term power deals that make aluminum smelting economically viable — a structural advantage rooted directly in Quebec’s model of public ownership of natural resources. For Benoit, that is not a curiosity but a template. “Quebec got it right,” he said. U.S. aluminum output, he added, now sits at a 75-year low — a signal, in his view, that the current tariff approach is failing on its own terms.
The intervention is a reminder that the trade debate does not divide neatly along free-market versus protectionist lines. Even within the protectionist camp, the case for de-escalation is growing — and the argument for sector-by-sector negotiation, grounded in the actual economics of production, is gaining traction on both sides of the border.
