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The federal government is hosting a summit in Toronto Friday aimed at bolstering the economy in the face of Canada’s rapidly changing relationship with its largest trading partner. U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to impose sweeping tariffs this week has been put on pause until March 4.That looming threat and the volatility of his administration has many business and labour leaders urging Canada to look for alternative trading partners and ways to strengthen internal trade.The summit is being hosted by the government’s newly created advisory council on Canada-U.S. relations, and includes business and labour leaders, Indigenous leaders and public policy experts.Flavio Volpe, a member of the advisory council and president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association, says he hopes the...

U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff threats and talk about making Canada the 51st state have made Canadians angry — very angry. A new poll by Ipsos for Global News found a whopping 68 per cent of Canadians surveyed think less of the United States as a country, after Trump threatened Canada’s economy with 25 per cent tariffs that were meant to go into effect this week, before being paused.Nearly half of all respondents, 46 per cent, said they strongly held that negative perception.“What surprised me is the intensity of the responses,” said Sean Simpson, senior vice president of Ipsos Public Affairs.The high number of people voicing strong opinions, he said, means “this isn’t some idea they have that they may or may not act on. This is something that they intend to follow through on. The fe...

Jamieson Greer, President Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. trade representative, said on Thursday that a universal tariff needs further study to gauge its impact on rising U.S. trade deficits, and put countries on notice they must lower import barriers to maintain access to the U.S. market. Greer told a U.S. Senate confirmation hearing that Trump’s campaign promise of imposing at least a 10% universal tariff would be examined under an inauguration day trade memo, which ordered a report by April 1.He said the study would also examine the impact of a growing U.S. goods trade deficit, which on Wednesday reached a record $1.2 trillion for all of 2024 as imports surged.“Part of the question is how large of a trade deficit do we want, because the trade deficit represents, in large part, manufactu...

With just one week left until Canada’s tax “holiday” ends, new data suggests it may have had little impact in its first month. Moneris looked into spending patterns between Dec. 14, 2024, when the tax “holiday” began and Jan. 15. Comparing the data to the same period in 2023-24, the payment processing firm found no year-over-year increases in spendingIn fact, the data showed purchasing may have slowed during that time.Across Canada, the data showed overall spending was down by four per cent, with the transaction count down by one per cent and the transaction size down by three per cent.“Consumers probably loved that they were paying… less in these categories, but they didn’t love it enough to respond to it by going and doing more of what they just did,” Sean McCormick, director of business...

It’s no secret that U.S. President Donald Trump isn’t the biggest fan of Prince Harry, but could the change in presidential power lead to the prince’s deportation from the United States? The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, the presidency blueprint that Trump has been heavily mirroring in the early weeks of his second term, has been pushing to know more about the prince’s immigration status and records ever since the royal admitted to using drugs in the past in his memoir, Spare.The think tank wants Harry’s immigration paperwork released, arguing there’s a possibility the Duke of Sussex lied on his forms about his past drug use or received special treatment from Joe Biden’s administration to enter the U.S. They want to know so badly, in fact, that they su...

The Liberal Party appears to be enjoying a polling bump at the expense of the Conservatives after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement he will not lead the party into the next election, according to the latest numbers from Ipsos Research for Global News. Trudeau’s pending departure and the threat of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war seem to be tightening the race in federal voting intention, despite voters not knowing who will become the next Liberal leader and prime minister.Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives still have a commanding lead in the national poll, with 41 per cent of respondents saying they’d vote for the party if an election were held tomorrow. That’s a 13 percentage point lead over the governing Liberals (28 per cent), according to the poll taken while the immine...