Trump says Canada has 'no room left' to escape 25% tariff

US President Donald Trump has said once again that 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods will be implemented on Tuesday.

Speaking in the White House, he said the tariffs will “have to” be applied on the US’s northern and southern neighbours. He said there was "no room left" for either country to escape the levies.

They were previously delayed by a month, with the president having then linked them to his concerns about fentanyl being smuggled into the US.

Now, however, he seems to be most concerned about trade.

President Trump Makes an Investment Announcement https://t.co/5G4JqT72Jp

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 3, 2025

“What they’ll have to do is build their car plants, frankly, and other things in the United States,” he said. “In which case they have no tariffs.”

He added: “I would just say this to people in Canada or Mexico: if they’re going to build car plants – the people that are doing them – they’re much better off building here, because we have the market.”

It will be “very exciting for the automobile companies,” the president added.

The North American auto manufacturing industry is famously integrated across the US, Canada and Mexico, a fact that has panicked some executives in the US amid Trump’s threats of tariffs.

The president's remarks about the tariffs come after he said in a Truth Social post late last month that he was committed to their implementation.

He was focused then on fentanyl, writing: “We cannot allow this scourge to continue to harm the USA, and therefore, until it stops, or is seriously limited, the proposed TARIFFS scheduled to go into effect on MARCH FOURTH will, indeed, go into effect, as scheduled.”

A host of Canadian officials, among them premiers and the prime minister himself, have been desperately attempting to persuade the US to exempt Canada from the tariff, which economists say would severely damage the country’s economy.

Justin Trudeau even created a "fentanyl czar" in an attempt to prove to the president that Canada was taking the smuggling of the drug – the vast majority of which enters the US via Mexico – seriously.

There are potential consolations on offer for fraught Canadians, however, including the president's behaviour at the end of January ahead of the previous threat that the tariff would come into force.

He said then, much as he did this afternoon, that there was nothing Canada could do to avoid the tariffs.

Trump explained in January that the decision was “purely economic,” adding that the US has “big deficits” with Canada and Mexico.

But he nonetheless backed down before the levies were put in place.

Former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, meanwhile, told British interviewers recently that she "knew" Trump was bluffing as soon as she saw the stock market's reaction to his plan to tariff Canadian goods.