Poilievre takes tariff fight to Motown

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OTTAWA — Canada’s opposition leader is headed to the Motor City.

Speaking to reporters at a press conference in Windsor on Tuesday — right across the river from Detroit, Mich. — Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre said he’s meeting with automakers and union leaders as part of his party’s fight for a tariff-free auto pact between Canada and the United States.

“We must put Canada first, and fight for tariff-free trade right across the border,” Poilievre said.

“And that means putting country ahead of party, and that is what Conservatives will do today.”

Passports in hand, Poilievre — joined by a delegation of Windsor-area MPs — will cross the border to meet with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), tour a General Motors plant in Detroit and a Ford plant in nearby Dearborn.

“We’ll pitch business leaders and workers on our plans, in the hope to build momentum for a real deal,” he said.

“Prime Minister Carney’s single-biggest promise in the last election was that he would ‘negotiate a win,’ ‘handle Trump,’ and finally, that he would have a deal by July 2025.”

Conservatives, Poilievre said, wanted Carney to keep that promise.

“We wanted him to succeed; that’s why we joined with Team Canada — we offered him our help, said we’ll do anything we can to help him achieve that goal,” Poilievre said, adding Tories have travelled to the U.S. numerous times to help coax a deal, and refused to criticize the PM or his policies on foreign soil.

“We’ve been cheering him on all along to get that tariff-free deal that he promised. Unfortunately, almost a year-and-a-half later, there’s no win, no deal, and things have gotten much worse.”

Trump tariffs hurting auto sector on both sides of the border

Stemming from broad emergency trade measures in 2025, President Trump hit Canadian auto imports with a 25% levy — touching off months of escalating duties and negotiations that went nowhere.

By August 2026, the White House doubled down with sweeping 50% tariffs — idling Canadian plants and leaving American assembly lines facing severe supply bottlenecks and increasing parts costs.

As the North American auto sector is heavily integrated, a single auto part can cross the border several times before a vehicle, transmission, or engine rolls off the assembly line.

The Conservative plan centers on performance-based production models, where automakers would receive duty-free trade access proportional to their production output in each country.

“The more an automaker produces in Canada, the more it can sell in Canada. The more it makes in the U.S., the more it can sell in the U.S.,” Poilievre said.

“For Canada, that means production would grow between 500,000 and 800,000 automobiles over the next 10 years in order to get that duty-free access.”

Such a rule, Poilievre said, would “repatriate” production to both Canada and the United States.

Other parts of the plan include maintaining a strict 75% North American content and parts requirements under existing trade agreements to keep jobs in both countries, banning vehicles containing connected software or technology from China and Russia to guard against surveillance, and cutting the GST from Canadian-built vehicles.

The Toronto Sun reached out to the PMO for reaction to Poilievre’s visit, and if any meetings with government officials took place beforehand.

bpassifiume@postmedia.com
X: @bryanpassifiume

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