Canada has formal demand before the WTO for the United States tariffs

The Canadian government filed a formal demand against the United States before the World Trade Organization (WTO) for the imposition of 25%customs tariffs, confirmed sources from the agency based in Geneva and the Canadian delegation before it.

«The American decision does not leave us another choice to respond to protect Canada’s interests,» the Canadian ambassador to the WTO, Nadia Theodore, hours after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that this demand would be filed in her LinkedIn account.

«It was not the outcome we expected, and we urged the US administration to reconsider their tariffs,» added the ambassador.

The demand for Canada joins the one that China presented a month ago before the WTO against the United States, and both are in the consultation phase, which implies that if the litigating parties do not reach a bilaterally negotiated agreement in 60 days the plaintiff can request the formation of a panel of experts to settle the contentious.

The decision of the panel could take months or even years, and if one of the parties resorts, it would go to the last instance of the WTO dispute resolution system, the appeal body, paralyzed since the end of 2019 for the United States’s refusal to agree on the appointment of new judges.

If the lack of appointments for that body is maintained, the conflict could move on to a limbo in which there are already about thirty commercial contentious from different economies before the WTO, including some that date back to the previous commercial war that the first Trump administration (2017-21) filed with China.

As retaliation, Canada has also begun to apply 25 % tariffs to US products worth 30,000 million Canadian dollars (20,740 million US dollars or 20,000 million euros).

Trudeau said that the president of the United States, Donald Trump, has imposed tariffs on Canada to collapse his economy and «that it is easier to annex» the country.