But exactly what the country will do remains unclear and the scale of the current disruption makes decision-making difficult.
The 25 percent tariff Canada began collecting on cars and trucks imported from the United States early Wednesday is not just the country’s latest act of retaliation against tariffs imposed by President Trump on Canadian exports.
The estimated 8 billion Canadian dollars a year, about $5.7 billion, that those levies are expected to generate will also bankroll help for companies and workers now under economic threat from the United States.
With no obvious or immediate end in sight to Mr. Trump’s tariffs push, Canada is now turning its attention on how to lessen the impact of the job losses, plant closings and bankruptcies that the levies are likely to cause. Other countries, including Spain and South Korea, have also announced various measures to try to cushion the blow from tariffs.
In Canada, the fallout from the tariffs on autos, the country’s largest export to the United States aside from energy, came quickly.
Hours before a 25 percent U.S. tariff on autos made in Canada went into effect this month, Stellantis announced that its assembly plant in Windsor, Ontario, was closing for two weeks as it assessed its plans.
Flavio Volpe, the president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association of Canada, estimates that up to 12,000 workers at parts plants in Canada and at Canadian-owned parts plants in the United States have been idled by the Stellantis shutdown.