Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent slammed Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney for negotiating an electric vehicle trade deal with China, coming on the heels of a tariff war with the United States. Bessent warned the agreement would turn the U.S. into a dumping ground for Chinese goods, the very outcome President Trump's tariffs were meant to prevent, while bolstering China’s expanding clout in global trade.
"Prime Minister Carney went to China, came back, dropped some industry-specific tariffs on Chinese goods, and we have a highly integrated market with Canada, sometimes in autos, which he dropped the EV tariff from 100 percent to six percent. Goods can cross the border during the manufacturing process six times," Bessent said on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday. "And we can't let Canada become an opening that the Chinese pour their cheap goods into the U.S. We have a U.S. MCA agreement, but based on that, which is going to be renegotiated this summer, I am not sure what Prime Minister Carney is doing here, other than trying to virtue signal to his globalist friends at Davos. I don't think he is doing the best job for the Canadian people."
ABC's Jonathan Karl then asked Bessent to clarify, after he showed a clip where President Trump said it was actually a good thing for Canada to make a deal with China. Bessent pushed back, arguing that a deal can be good up until a point. That point, Bessent said, is a free trade deal with China.
Canada had imposed a 100 percent tariff on Chinese EVs, just like the U.S. did in 2024, but under a new deal, Beijing can now sell 49,000 EVs at a 6.1 percent most-favored-nation rate.
“There’s a possibility of a hundred percent tariffs if they do a free trade deal, if they go further — if we see that the Canadians are allowing the Chinese to dump goods,” Bessent went on. “The Canadians, a few months ago, joined the U.S. in putting high steel tariffs on China because the Chinese are dumping. The Europeans also have done the same thing. And it looks like Prime Minister Carney may have done some kind of about-face.”
Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent on President Trump’s new tariff threat on Canada: “We can't let Canada become an opening that the Chinese pour their cheap goods into the U.S.” https://t.co/iBMlGEXMHv pic.twitter.com/XhYdjLe7uN
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) January 25, 2026
Last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Carney had declared that the "old order" was changing, as President Trump sought to control Greenland.
“We know the old order is not coming back,” Carney said. “We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.”
“This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation.”
But genuine cooperation with a dictatorship and a power-hungry superpower like China? That’s simply idiotic. In any world order, relying on a regime that suppresses its own people, forcefully rewrites the rules of trade, and openly seeks to expand its influence at the expense of others is a recipe for betrayal, manipulation, and compromise of national interests.
No amount of rhetoric about "shared goals” can erase the reality that engagement with Beijing always comes with strings attached, strings that every country should view as a liability.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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