Ontario enlists Ronald Reagan against Trump’s tariffs

TORONTO — Ontario is using Ronald Reagan to warn that Donald Trump’s tariffs will cost Americans their jobs.

“We’re going to repeat that message to every Republican district there is right across the entire country,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said this week, teasing the new ad campaign at a Toronto business luncheon.

The one-minute ad excerpts a 1987 radio address by Reagan to justify imposing 100 percent tariffs on Japanese electronics over a trade dispute over semiconductors.

Reagan’s address warned of the long-term economic perils of tariffs on foreign imports sold to Americans as a protectionist policy and explained they were imposed to sort a particular problem — not to begin a trade war.

“But over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American, worker and consumer,” Reagan narrates in the ad. “High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars. Then the worst happens. Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down and millions of people lose their jobs.”

China’s embassy in Washington notably used the same Reagan clip to troll Trump’s global tariffs when the China-U.S. trade war heated up in the spring.

Ontario’s ad will air on Newsmax and Bloomberg this week, according to Ford’s office. It will launch on other major networks and their local affiliates, including Fox, NBC, Comcast, Spectrum, Sinclair Group, CBS, CNBC and ESPN in the next two weeks.

Ford said at the event that CNN is unlikely to air the aid, explaining, “They’re a little nervous.”

CNN would not comment on Ford’s remark.

The campaign will run until the end of January and will cost C$75 million.

Donald Trump’s global tariffs and trade war with Canada has roiled relations between two allies, though Prime Minister Mark Carney seems to have struck a congenial, mutually respectful relationship with the president, unlike his predecessor Justin Trudeau.

In a Thursday interview on Fox Business Network, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer echoed the administration’s optimism in working with the Carney government, which he called “much more centrist, much more interested in exploiting their energy resources.”

“We’re developing a great relationship with them,” Greer said before making the point that America has to protect its own interests first. “If that means that we have tariffs and we'll have tariffs, but I think there are ways to cooperate with Canadians on things that are of mutual interest to us both.”

Canada-U.S. Minister Dominic LeBlanc and Privy Council Clerk Michael Sabia are in Washington this week to take advantage of the momentum created by Trump’s recent White House meeting with Carney toward sectoral deals.

The Carney government has said the current priority is on achieving bilateral deals for partial tariff relief on steel, aluminum and energy sectors. Bigger trilateral trade talks are scheduled to formally begin next year to review the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Doug Palmer contributed to this story from Washington.