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Canada PM under pressure to stand up to Trump over tariff plan; US motorists could face higher gas prices – live
Justin Trudeau under pressure to stand up to Trump on tariffs
Other members of Canada’s parliament are calling on prime minister Justin Trudeau to ready a “war room” for the coming battle over tariffs with the United States.
“The only thing a bully responds to is strength. So where is our plan to fight back?” Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party, asked Trudeau. “Where is the war room?”
“I don’t think the idea of going to war with the United States is what anyone wants. What we will do is stand up for Canadian jobs,” Trudeau said. “Stand up for the prosperity we create when we work together.”
Meanwhile, members of Canada’s liberal and conservative parties are debating ways Trudeau could promote a “Canada First” policy or work collaboratively with “our US partner.”
Key events
In an election post-mortem today, top Harris campaign officials said there was little else Kamala Harris could have done to win the 2024 election.
Speaking on the podcast “Pod Save America”, David Plouffe, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks and Stephanie Cutter said Harris couldn’t have distanced herself further from Joe Biden because she was loyal and faced backlash over inflation that’s hurt incumbent politicians across the globe this year.
“She had tremendous loyalty to President Biden,” Cutter said. “Imagine if we said, ‘Well, we would have taken this approach on the border.’ Imagine the round of stories coming out after that, of people saying, ‘Well, she never said that in the meeting.’”
Plouffe added that the campaign’s internal polling never showed Harris leading president-elect Donald Trump.
“We didn’t get the breaks we needed on Election Day,” he said. “I think it surprised people, because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.”
Fulks noted that Democrats could learn from how Republicans support their own, even amid controversy.
“Democrats are eating our own to a very high degree, and until that stops, we’re not going to be able to address a lot of the things that just need to be said,” he said.
During a thank-you call today, Kamala Harris told small-dollar donors that they helped to raise $1.4 billion over the course of her 107-day campaign.
“The outcome of the election, of this election, obviously, is not what we wanted. It is not what we worked so hard for, but I am proud of the race we ran and your role was critical — what we did in 107 days was unprecedented,” she said. “The fight that fueled our campaign, a fight for freedom and opportunity, did not end on November 5th.”
Harris’s running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, joined the call and urged supporters to “find the place in your community to heal both yourselves and your community.” He acknowledged feels of grief that supporters might be feeling and added, “You did everything that was asked.”
Donald Trump’s team has announced that it has signed transition paperwork with the White House, which the incoming administration appeared to be dodging after failing to sign the agreement by its 1 October due date. The agreement, which directs $7.2m in federal funding to the transition, requires the incoming presidential administration to agree to an ethics pledge and cap private donations.
The announcement that Trump’s team had signed the memorandum of understanding with the White House came in a press release from Trump’s chief-of-staff Susie Wiles.
“After completing the selection process of his incoming Cabinet, President-elect Trump is entering the next phase of his administration’s transition by executing a Memorandum of Understanding with President Joe Biden’s White House. This engagement allows our intended Cabinet nominees to begin critical preparations, including the deployment of landing teams to every department and agency, and complete the orderly transition of power,” she said.
Biden says Israel and Hezbollah have accepted ceasefire deal
Speaking from the White House, Joe Biden has announced a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah.
“Under the deal reached today, effective at 4am tomorrow local time, the fighting across the Lebanese-Israeli border will end,” he said. “This is designed to be a permanent cesation of hostility.”
Explaining the terms of the deal, Biden said, the Lebanese army will take control of the region as Israel withdraws its forces over the next 60 days. Hezbollah will not be allowed to rebuild its infrastructure. “There will be no US troops deployed in southern Lebanon,” he said, adding that the US and France would continue to provide support to Lebanon. If Lebanon fails to abide by the terms of the agreement, Biden said, Israeli retains the right to defend itself.
“Now Hamas has a choice to make,” Biden said, gesturing to the ongoing war in Gaza. “Over the coming days, the United States will make another push – with Turkey, Egypt, Qatar, Israel and others – to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza.”
Pentagon rebuts Musk’s claim of meeting with ‘senior military officers’ – report
A day after Elon Musk claimed to have met with “senior military officers,” the Pentagon told reporters it was not aware of any meetings with Trump transition officials, the Washington Post reports.
“The president-elect’s transition team has not contacted the department yet to conduct those transitions, so I’m not aware of any official meetings,” Pentagon press secretary Patrick Ryder told reporters. Donald Trump’s transition team has declined to sign paperwork that would require the incoming administration to agree to an ethics pledge and cap private donations, which has slowed the transition.
Yesterday, Musk claimed to have met with “senior military officers today” in a social media post responding to a statement from Vivek Ramaswamy about government efficiency.
“In a meeting with senior military officers today, they told me that it now takes longer to renovate stairs (24 months) in the Pentagon than it took to build the WHOLE Pentagon (16 months) in the 1940s!!” Musk wrote.
Speaking at an emergency gathering of the Canadian parliament today, Justin Trudeau urged unity while leaders of two of the country’s largest industrial and oil-rich provinces raised concerns over US-Canada relations, Reuters reports.
The premier of Ontario, the country’s industrial heartland, said Trump had good reason to be worried about border security.
“Do we need to do a better job on our borders? 1,000 percent … we do have to listen to the threat of too many illegals crossing the border,” Doug Ford told reporters. “We have to squash the illegal drugs, the illegal guns.”
Ford has called on Trudeau to abandon the U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade deal in favor of a bilateral agreement with the US, and called Trump’s comparison of Canada to Mexico “the most insulting thing I have ever heard”.
Likewise, the premier of the oil-rich province of Alberta said yesterday that Trump had valid concerns over border security.
“We are calling on the federal government to work with the incoming administration to resolve these issues immediately, thereby avoiding any unnecessary tariffs on Canadian exports to the U.S.,” Danielle Smith said in a social media post. She added, “The vast majority of Alberta’s energy exports to the U.S. are delivered through secure and safe pipelines which do not in any way contribute to these illegal activities at the border.”
A federal judge has rejected Rudy Giuliani’s request to reschedule a January trial date for after Donald Trump’s inauguration. The judge has ordered Giuliani to pay two Georgia election workers $148 million for spreading falsehoods after the 2020 election. The 16 January trial had been set to determine whether Giuliani would have to relinquish assets such as a Palm Beach condo and Yankees World Series rings to pay the judgement.
“My client regularly consults and deals directly with President-elect Trump on issues that are taking place as the incoming administration is afoot as well as inauguration events,” Giuliani’s attorney Joseph Cammarata said. “My client wants to exercise his political right to be there.”
“The defendant’s social calendar does not constitute good cause [to delay the trial],” US District Court Judge Lewis Liman said. He did suggest that he would be open to moving the trial forward a few days.
Justin Trudeau under pressure to stand up to Trump on tariffs
Other members of Canada’s parliament are calling on prime minister Justin Trudeau to ready a “war room” for the coming battle over tariffs with the United States.
“The only thing a bully responds to is strength. So where is our plan to fight back?” Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party, asked Trudeau. “Where is the war room?”
“I don’t think the idea of going to war with the United States is what anyone wants. What we will do is stand up for Canadian jobs,” Trudeau said. “Stand up for the prosperity we create when we work together.”
Meanwhile, members of Canada’s liberal and conservative parties are debating ways Trudeau could promote a “Canada First” policy or work collaboratively with “our US partner.”
Canadian PM questioned on Trump’s tariff plans
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau is discussing the United States’ proposed tariffs with the leader of the opposition, Pierre Poilievre, before the Canadian parliament. Poilievre has criticized Trudeau, calling on him to “put Canada first” in its relations with the United States and do more to fix Canada’s “broken borders” and “liberalization of drugs”.
“The prime minister’s disastrous legalization and liberalization of drugs has the Americans worried,” Poilievre said. “Where’s the plan to stop the drugs and keep our border open to trade?”
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau is expected to speak shortly at today’s gathering of the nation’s parliament, just a day after Donald Trump threatened to levy 25% tariffs against the US’s northern neighbor.
Trudeau spoke with Trump earlier today, and said “it was a good call,” adding that they “obviously talked about laying out the facts, talking about how the intense and effective connections between our two countries flow back and forth.”
Trump missed Kim?
Joanna Walters
Donald Trump’s team is discussing pursuing direct talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, hoping a fresh diplomatic push can lower the risks of armed conflict, according to two people familiar with the matter, Reuters reports.
Several in Trump’s team now see a direct approach from Trump, to build on a relationship that already exists, as most likely to break the ice with Kim, years after the two traded insults and what Trump called “beautiful” letters in an unprecedented diplomatic effort during his first term in office, the people said.
The policy discussions are fluid and no final decisions have been made by the president-elect, the sources said.
Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
What reciprocation Kim will offer Trump is unclear. The North Koreans ignored four years of outreach by outgoing president Joe Biden to start talks with no pre-conditions, and Kim is emboldened by an expanded missile arsenal and a much closer relationship with Russia.
We have already gone as far as we can on negotiating with the United States,” Kim said last week in a speech at a Pyongyang military exhibition, according to state media.
During his 2017-2021 presidency, Trump held three meetings with Kim, in Singapore, Hanoi, and at the Korean border, the first time a sitting US president had set foot in the country.
Their diplomacy yielded no concrete results, even as Trump described their talks as falling “in love.” The US called for North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons, while Kim demanded full sanctions relief, then issued new threats.
North Korea has sent troops to fight alongside Russia in its war with Ukraine.
Trump tariffs on crude oil imports threatens higher gas prices for US motorists
Joanna Walters
Donald Trump’s pledge to impose 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports in his first day in office does not exempt crude oil from the trade penalties, two sources familiar with the plan told Reuters today.
Oil producers already warned that tariffs on crude would drive up the price of gas for US motorists, the FT reported earlier.
“A 25% tariff on oil and natural gas would likely result in lower production in Canada and higher gasoline and energy costs to American consumers while threatening North American energy security,” Lisa Baiton, head of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, told the business-focussed newspaper.
In the vagaries of the markets and geopolitics, oil prices rose earlier on news of Trump’s tariffs pledge, over predictions they would discourage production, thereby raising prices, but now have dropped slightly, Reuters reports, on news of a pending ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, apparently because Wall Streeters, leaping 10 steps ahead, imagine it could lead to a relaxing of sanctions on Iran and therefore a glut of oil supply, suppressing prices….
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