Trump Digs In on Canada; Legal Challenges Loom

President Trump spent Sunday refusing to move off the trade terms Canadian negotiators walked away from, posting an angry message on social media at 1 a.m. and leaving his 50% tariffs on Canadian imports in place with no new talks on the calendar.

"Canada wants the benefits of being a State, without being one!!! They have also charged our great farmers, for many years, massive amounts of Tariffs. No more!!!" Trump posted, according to The Washington Times.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told "Fox and Friends Weekend" that no new trade talks are scheduled.

The Frank covered the tariffs taking effect and Canada's Sept. 8 retaliation here: Canada Tariffs Take Effect; Ottawa Retaliates Sept. 8. This is what moved Sunday.

Trump's Position

Greer framed the collapse as Canada's choice. Canada "declined to finalize the trade deal under the terms agreed earlier this week," he said in a statement, calling those terms "the best treatment of any major exporter to our market."

"We've said enough, and so we've taken countermeasures," Greer said on Fox. "Our interest is in protecting American workers and protecting American supply chains."

The 50% tariffs went on roughly $20 billion worth of Canadian imports Saturday, after Canadian leaders cut off negotiations late Friday. They were originally set to hit earlier in the week; Trump extended the deadline to let talks continue.

Canada's Account

Prime Minister Mark Carney says the talks came apart because U.S. negotiators introduced last-minute changes — among them limits on Canada's ability to strike trade deals with other countries.

"We're the partner of choice in many respects for countries around the world, and the Americans wanted to restrict that. Unacceptable," Carney said at a weekend press conference.

Carney said U.S. negotiators also blindsided Ottawa with a change to proposed auto tariff reductions that would have excluded medium- and heavy-duty trucks, and pushed to curb Canada's French-language programming rules on streaming services and its bilingual labelling requirements for appliances, electronics and instruction manuals exported from the U.S.

Canada will impose dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs beginning Sept. 8 on steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, paper and electronics.

The Legal Fight

The second front opening Sunday is in court. Trump imposed the tariffs under Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 — a provision critics say has been dead for decades.

Writing at Reason's Volokh Conspiracy, George Mason law professor Ilya Somin called the tariffs "harmful and illegal" and an "illegal usurpation of congressional authority by the president," and said he expects legal challenges that "will deserve to prevail."

Somin cites Philip Zelikow of the Hoover Institution, who has argued Section 338 was superseded by legislation enacted in 1962 and 1974 and is therefore defunct — it has not been used to impose tariffs since at least the 1940s. Georgetown trade law specialist Peter Harrell has argued the Canada tariffs fail the statute's own requirements even if Section 338 is still live.

Trump has lost on other tariff authorities. The Supreme Court struck down his International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs in February, and the U.S. Court of International Trade invalidated his Section 122 tariffs in April, a ruling now on appeal.

Somin's warning to judges is about timing: the Federal Circuit's stay of the first ruling against the IEEPA tariffs let the administration collect some $166 billion in tariff payments he describes as illegal, and billions remained unrefunded five months after the Supreme Court ruled.