Canada also said it’s open to the idea after Bessent said it could help build a ‘Fortress North America’ from the flood of Chinese imports.
Mexico has made a “very interesting” proposal of matching U.S. tariffs on China, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Feb. 28.
It came after Mexico’s Economy Secretary Marcelo Ebrard held trade talks with U.S. officials in Washington ahead of new U.S. tariffs on Mexican goods.
Speaking to Bloomberg Television, Bessent said, “I do think one very interesting proposal that the Mexican government has made is perhaps matching the U.S. on our China tariffs.”
Bessent suggested that Canada could do the same, saying it would be “a nice gesture.”
“So, in a way, we could have ‘Fortress North America’ from the flood of Chinese imports that’s coming out of the most unbalanced economy in the history of modern times,” the treasury secretary said.
Asked about the proposal in Vancouver, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly told reporters that Canada is “very open to hav[ing] trade-related conversation, including when it comes to China.”
President Donald Trump previously planned to impose additional tariffs on goods from China, Mexico, and Canada from Feb. 4, saying he was holding the countries accountable for their failure to halt the flow of illegal immigration and poisonous drugs such as fentanyl into the United States.
The additional 10 percent tariffs on Chinese goods have taken effect as planned, while Canada and Mexico secured a four-week delay.
Following a month of negotiations, Washington has said its two neighbors have “done a reasonable job” securing their borders. Trump is now mulling what level of tariffs will take effect on March 4 instead of the previously promised level of 25 percent.
The president is also expected to raise his 10 percent tariffs on China to 20 percent on Tuesday, unless the regime stops the flow of fentanyl precursors to countries like Mexico.
Beijing says it holds no responsibility in the United States’s fentanyl crisis. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian told reporters on Feb. 28 that the U.S. tariff hikes “severely violate the WTO [World Trade Organization] rules, and harm the interests of both countries and the world.”
Since 2013, the availability of the deadly drug has dramatically pushed up the rate of overdose deaths from synthetic opioids in the United States. In 2022 alone, synthetic opioids such as fentanyl killed at least 73,838 people in the United States, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Fentanyl and precursors of the drug from China continue to be shipped to the United States in small packages. Precursors have also been shipped to other countries such as Mexico before their final product is smuggled into the United States.
According to a report published in April 2024 by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese regime owns stakes in some companies that were openly advertising the sale of illegal drugs to the Americas and subsidizing the companies.
Since January 2023, the U.S. Justice Department has indicted a number of Chinese chemical companies and executives over fentanyl.
Two Chinese nationals, Qingzhou Wang, 36, and Yiyi Chen, 32, were convicted on Jan. 29 for selling more than 440 pounds of fentanyl precursors to undercover U.S. law enforcement agents.
Beijing has also repeatedly said it supports the United States in its crackdown on fentanyl, and that the regime has “the world’s strictest” rules on narcotics.
Announcing new China tariffs in February, Trump dismissed Beijing’s public statements, saying the communist regime’s “most sophisticated domestic surveillance network,” “most comprehensive domestic law enforcement apparatus,” and routine harassment of political dissidents outside of China show it “does not lack the capacity to severely blunt the global illicit opioid epidemic; it simply is unwilling to do so.”