(Reuters) – U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Thursday said the one-month reprieve on hefty tariffs on goods imported from Mexico and Canada that has been granted to automotive products is likely to be extended to all products that comply with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade.
Lutnick told CNBC he is hopeful President Donald Trump will announce that extension on Thursday, a day after exempting automotive goods from the 25% tariffs he slapped on imports from Canada and Mexico earlier in the week.
Trump “is going to decide this today,” Lutnick said, adding “it’s likely that it will cover all USMCA-compliant goods and services.”
“So if you think about it this way, if you lived under Donald Trump’s US-Mexico-Canada agreement, you will get a reprieve from these tariffs now. If you chose to go outside of that, you did so at your own risk, and today is when that reckoning comes,” he said.
Lutnick said his “off the cuff” estimate was that more than 50% of the goods imported from the two U.S. neighbors – also its largest two trading partners – were compliant with the USMCA deal that Trump negotiated during his first term as president.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called Lutnick’s comments “promising” in remarks to reporters in Canada.
“That aligns with some of the conversations that we have been having with administration officials, but I’m going to wait for an official agreement to talk about Canadian response and look at the details of it,” Trudeau said. “But it is a promising sign. But I will highlight that it means that the tariffs remain in place, and therefore our response will remain in place.”
(Reporting By Dan Burns in New York and David Ljunggren in Ottawa; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Alistair Bell)
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