By Barnaby "Bottom-Line" Coyne
The clock is running down on Washington and Ottawa, and both sides know it.
Negotiators from the United States and Canada are locked in what the BBC describes as "intense" last-minute talks to avert a fresh round of tariffs — reportedly as high as 50% — that President Trump has threatened to impose. ABC News likewise describes the two countries scrambling against a looming deadline, with relations already strained by trade disputes and by Trump's repeated, inflammatory suggestion that Canada become the 51st U.S. state.
For Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the diplomacy doesn't end at the negotiating table. Whatever concessions his team makes, he will need to sell them to Canadians — a domestic political challenge layered on top of an already difficult external one.
The stakes are not abstract. Tariffs at that scale would land on the price tags of goods crossing the world's longest shared border — everything from lumber and cars to food products — and on the businesses and workers on both sides who depend on that trade continuing to flow smoothly. A 50% tariff is not a technical adjustment; it is a wall.
What exactly is on the table in these talks — which sectors, which carve-outs, which timeline for phase-in — has not been detailed in the reporting available here, and readers should treat the shape of any eventual deal as unconfirmed until negotiators actually sign something. Deadlines in these standoffs have a way of moving before they arrive.
Somebody's paying for this. Let's find out who.
— Compiled from reporting by the BBC and ABC News.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."