It’s the latest twist in a fluctuating trade policy that has unsettled financial markets and fanned worries
The exemptions, covering the two largest US trading partners, expire on April 2, when Trump threatens to impose a global regime of reciprocal tariffs on all US trading partners.
Trump had imposed a 25 per cent levy on imports from both on Tuesday and had mentioned an exemption only for Mexico earlier on Thursday, but the amendment he signed on Thursday afternoon covered Canada as well.
The three countries are partners in a North American trade pact.
For Canada, the amended order also excludes duties on potash, a critical fertiliser for US farmers, but does not fully cover energy products, on which Trump has imposed a separate 10 per cent levy.
A White House official said that was because not all energy products imported from Canada were covered under the US- Mexico- Canada Agreement on trade that Trump negotiated in his first term as president.
Trump imposed the tariffs after declaring a national emergency on January 20, his first day in office, due to deaths from fentanyl overdoses, asserting that the deadly opioid and its precursor chemicals make their way from China to the US via Canada and Mexico.
Trump has also imposed tariffs of 20 per cent on all imports from China as a result.
Trump first announced the levies at the beginning of February, but he delayed them for Canada and Mexico until Tuesday. Earlier this week he declined to delay them again, and doubled a 10 per cent levy that had been in force since February 4 on Chinese imports.
"On April 2, we're going to move with the reciprocal tariffs, and hopefully Mexico and Canada will have done a good enough job on fentanyl that this part of the conversation will be off the table, and we'll move just to the reciprocal tariff conversation," Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC. "But if they haven't, this will stay on."
Trump also said 25 per cent tariffs on imports of steel and aluminium would go into effect as scheduled on March 12.
With AAP.
