On Friday October 5th parts of your Union Executive met with Minister Ralph Goodale . In attendance for the Union was myself {Mike Day}, Ryan Mckenzie and USW Staff Rep Patrick Veinot.
There was lots of discussion on what we can recycle, orders that we have down to the U.S. Questions on the Cheniere Line that we did that started the duties. He was also curious about the plants in the states, if they can do what we can. He brought up the LNG project that has been approved and hopes they use our products even though it is his understanding that some of it has to be brought in and can’t be produced here.
We brought up the obvious regarding the tariffs and the government leaving out steel and aluminum in the negotiations. How We had discussions with him over 15 months ago when this started coming to light{ section 232} and steel was what brought this to the for front and how could we be left behind. We’ve seen Wilbur Ross talk about how a new agreement would then naturally have the tariffs go away. This is as important to him as it is to us and he told us they are actively working on it. Freeland and Lighthizer are meeting this week and continuing discussions. I told him we don’t see how a “quota system” is beneficial to anyone this side of border and isn’t good in general.
We brought up how dumping has increased here in Canada and their response was that in the next couple weeks we should here some news on the “Safeguards”. Below was just released from the Federal Government last night.
Backgrounder – Relief for Canadian Businesses from Countermeasures on Certain U.S. Imports
His office is to keep in touch with us to continue these discussions and would like to know what our membership would like to see. The initial response was Duties and Tariffs gone and Unions to have the ability to file trade/dumping cases .