Bloomberg

President-Elect Donald Trump will follow through on his plans to hit imports with tariffs but is likely to carve out exemptions for sectors such as Canadian oil and gas, former US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said.

Canada is the largest external supplier of energy to the US, reaching nearly $160 billion in 2022, most of which is crude oil, petroleum products or natural gas.

“We import a lot of energy from Canada. I can’t imagine that the president would want to tax that, because all it would do would be to raise our costs and not help anything with more American jobs,” Ross told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. “So I think it’s easy to have the fears be overblown.”

Trump has called “tariff” the “most beautiful word in the dictionary” and promised his protectionist trade strategy will boost US manufacturing.

Ross was commerce secretary from 2017 to 2021, when the first Trump administration imposed tariffs on goods including steel and aluminum from China, Canada, Mexico and the European Union. Ross also helped renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was replaced with what’s now called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, altering the region’s rules on auto manufacturing and a host of other issues.

Ross urged western countries to increase their defense budgets. Trump has long criticized members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, including Canada, that don’t meet their pledge to spend 2% of gross domestic product on defense. “Clearly the world is a more dangerous place right now,” Ross said in the CBC interview.

“Canada has to realize that America does have a much sturdier set of principles and policies now than what it had before,” he said. “So if I were Canada, I would be looking for what things Canada can volunteer to do to facilitate the relationship with the US.”