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Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre speaks to supporters on election night in Ottawa in the early hours of April 29, 2025. Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is asking the Liberal government to adopt various proposals from the Tories in order to seek the removal of U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods, including establishing a Strategic Energy and Minerals Reserve that would be available only to countries that provide tariff-free market access to Canada.
“This would strengthen Canada’s hand by making secure access to our critical minerals a reward for free and fair trade,” Poilievre said in a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney on Aug. 9.
He said the Conservatives had proposed policies that would “unleash” Canada’s resources and industrial base, secure its land, and confront forced-labour products in its markets.
It was reported this week that Carney is preparing to “make even more concessions” to U.S. President Donald Trump in exchange for only partial relief from U.S. tariffs, Poilievre wrote.
The letter comes ahead of talks between Canadian and U.S. negotiators over a planned 50 percent U.S. tariff on Canadian goods as retaliation in response to Canada’s counter-tariffs imposed on U.S. automobiles, along with other measures including barring U.S. access to Canada’s dairy market and the refusal by eight provinces to stock U.S. liquor products.
In his letter, Poilievre criticized Carney for the concessions he has made in the past year and a half in trade negotiations with the United States.
“You dropped the Digital Services Tax and Netflix Tax, removed Canada’s retaliatory tariffs, and handed the United States half of the net toll revenue from the Gordie Howe International Bridge before Canada has even recovered its construction costs,” Poiliever wrote. “Worse, you have lost ground with American tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum doubling and broadening, and tariffs on lumber tripling.”
Carney’s government rescinded the Digital Services Tax (DST) in June 2025 as part of its negotiations with the United States. The tax was a 3 percent levy on certain digital-services revenue that tech companies earned from Canadian users, including revenue from online marketplaces, advertising, social media, and certain user data sales.
It is unclear what Poilievre was referring to by a “Netflix Tax.” However, Netflix still collects, depending on the province, either the federal Goods and Services Tax (GST) or the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) on its monthly subscription fees in Canada. This measure took effect following the passage of Bill C-30 in 2021.
Canada did remove or reduce some of its retaliatory tariffs against the United States but continues to maintain tariff measures on some U.S. products. Ottawa in June extended certain steel and aluminum tariff measures for one year to provide some relief to Canadian businesses that rely on those U.S. inputs.
As for the Gordie Howe International Bridge, Canada financed the approximately $6.4 billion crossing between Windsor, Ont., and Detroit, Mich., under a cost-recovery model, according to federal briefing material, with Ottawa saying toll revenues would repay Canada’s investment before net revenues are shared equally with Michigan.
However, a new agreement made with Washington in July said that during the bridge’s first 15 years of operation, Ottawa will share half of the net revenue with an economic development fund that’s “solely controlled” by the U.S. government, where net revenue is defined as “all revenues collected with respect to the bridge” minus operating costs. The agreement does not mention interest costs or repayment of the $6.4 billion construction cost.
During a visit to the Rio Tinto aluminum production facility in Saguenay, Que., on Aug. 6, Carney said multiple options were being discussed in trade negotiations with the United States, and that Canada wants a broader arrangement.
“We’re interested in a more comprehensive deal, more global deal that addresses the strategic sectors, as well as aluminum, where there’s a win-win deal that should be there—steel, automobiles, forest products, and a series of what are called derivative products,” he said.
