OTTAWA — As Canada prepares to return the economic pain inflicted by new U.S. tariffs, two western premiers pushed back against calls to turn the region’s potash and oil into tools of retaliation.
Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe said he supports the dollar-for-dollar countermeasures announced by Prime Minister Mark Carney, but the goal must be to get back to the negotiating table with U.S. President Donald Trump after trade talks collapsed last Friday.
“What we as a province cannot and will not support is any kind of export tariff on our natural resources or any of our resources that are being exported to the U.S., or through the U.S., to other areas of the world,” Moe said at a news conference on Wednesday in Prince Albert, Sask.
Moe also announced his province will impose a 50 per cent reciprocal tax on American alcohol starting Sept. 8 in response to the U.S. applying 50 per cent tariffs on $28 billion worth of Canadian booze and other goods.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith also pushed back hard against the assertion that oil flowing to the U.S. should be hit with export tariffs, saying the U.S. could in turn slap its own levies on the oil, natural gas and diesel that it exports into Ontario and Quebec.
The premiers’ stance against putting natural resources on the retaliation table showed a fault line in the Team Canada approach Carney and the premiers have tried to keep in the face of Trump’s new tariffs.
Moe’s comments came after Ontario Premier Doug Ford earlier in the day raised the spectre of choking the supply of potash to the U.S., a key fertilizer ingredient, as a reaction to Trump saying Canada does not have “anything” his country needs.
“If we ever cut out that potash, their agricultural sector would be dead overnight, absolutely dead,” Ford told reporters in Vaughan.
“That is one of the most powerful tools we have.”
Former Alberta premier Jason Kenney told The Canadian Press on Tuesday that measures such as putting export taxes on resources like oil and potash ought to be on the table.
“(That) would affect Republicans who drive F-150s and lay fertilizer on their farm fields,” Kenney said.
“Call it playing our trump card,” he wrote.
Moe listed ramifications like potential job losses and higher prices. He also pointed to past policy decisions that he says have limited where and how western provinces can get their products to market. He pointed to Canada’s lack of refining capacity for heavy crude and the fierce opposition proponents of the since-abandoned Energy East pipeline faced when it came to the proposed route of sending oil from Saskatchewan and Alberta to Quebec and New Brunswick.
“All too often, those very same individuals that are promoting export tariffs on a product like oil, 10 years ago were the very same individuals standing up and saying we should not build important energy security infrastructure like the Energy East pipeline,” Moe said.
Smith, speaking from Grande Prairie, Alta., also warned of potential job losses and the economic pain that could bring those provinces, as well as to the Canadian economy as a whole. She said another risk is the U.S. could turn away from Canadian oil and look more to countries like Venezuela.
“Although I understand the need to respond strongly to these tariffs, I cannot think of a more disastrous policy decision than cutting off or taxing Alberta’s oil to the United States,” Smith said.
On Wednesday morning, Trump spoke to an American conservative commentator about the collapse of the Canada-U.S. trade talks, saying he had offered what he believed to be a “pretty good deal.”
He also repeated his concerns about Canada taking “advantage” of the U.S.
“They don’t have anything that we have to have,” Trump said. “We can get by. I mean, there are couple of things that would make it a little inconvenient, but we can get (them) elsewhere.”
“It’s time to teach Canada you can’t do this anymore,” he added.
Ford pushed back against Trump’s comments, pointing to the millions of barrels of oil Canada sends to the U.S., as well as its supply of potash, a key ingredient in fertilizer.
“What would happen if Scott Moe decided, ‘OK, I’m rerouting the potash’ … 90 per cent goes down to the U.S.”
“Everyone in the world wants our potash,” Ford added. “So the president has a choice: either be fair to us, or deal with Russia, get your potash off Russia, see how well they trade it.”
The U.S. has so far excluded potash and oil from its tariffs on Canadian goods. Moe, whose province is home to Canada’s potash mines and uses U.S. ports to ship the product globally, said Canada would risk losing a long-term customer in the U.S. if it were to impose any export tariffs, and the Americans could instead look to smaller potash-producing nations like Belarus.
“This would be a tremendously flawed policy on behalf of Canadians.”
The American Farm Bureau Federation, which represents U.S. farmers, warned the Trump administration at the onset of the Canada-U.S. trade war early last year that 85 per cent of the potash used by American farmers for fertilizer comes from Canada.
United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who had been leading the negotiations for the Trump administration, in a rare interview with CBC News warned on Wednesday that should Canada retaliate, “we’re not going to just sit down and take that.”
Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro also pushed back against both Carney and Ford, saying he believes the prime minister sees his political fortunes rise for “trashing Donald Trump,” while his economy takes a hit.
Navarro also referred to Ford as the prime minister’s “German shepherd” who keeps “egging him on,” saying the pair fail to understand that because the U.S. has the bigger of the two economies, “they need us more than we need them.”
For his part, Carney reinforced his sovereignty message through sharing a snippet from his Davos speech on social media, showing him shaking hands and meeting with European and other world leaders.
“The old order is not coming back. From the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger and more just,” he wrote.
Editor’s note: the Star article is paywalled. Text recovered from an archive.today snapshot taken 27 August 2026 (archive.ph/lG7gA); treat as accurate but not authoritative. The original URL is preserved above. Archived here because the export-tax proposal the premiers are rejecting is Avi Lewis’s signature trade-war plank, restated by the NDP the same week.