Canada’s Biggest Private-Sector Union Says Carney’s Trump Tariff Response Still Falls Short

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Canada has answered the latest escalation in Donald Trump’s trade war with a response designed to show both resolve and restraint. Ottawa is preparing new counter-tariffs covering $27.6 billion in U.S. imports while rolling out a $7.5-billion package aimed at workers and businesses facing mounting trade pressure. Yet Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, says the response is still not enough.

The union supports the decision to retaliate and has praised Ottawa for refusing to accept a trade deal it viewed as damaging to Canadian industry. Its concern is what happens after tariffs take effect. With hundreds of thousands of members and roughly 120,000 working in trade-exposed industries, Unifor is pushing the Carney government toward a much bigger objective: keeping industrial jobs in Canada even if the trade confrontation lasts for years.

Ottawa’s Retaliation Is Significant, but It Is Only One Layer of the Response

The federal government’s latest measures are not symbolic. After the United States imposed 50% tariffs on $27.6 billion worth of Canadian goods effective August 22, Ottawa announced that Canada would respond dollar for dollar and rate for rate. Beginning September 8, Canadian counter-tariffs of 15%, 25% and 50% are scheduled to hit U.S. imports including steel, dairy products, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper products, and electronics. Existing Canadian countermeasures affecting the auto sector also remain in place.

Alongside those tariffs, Ottawa announced $7.5 billion in new and expanded assistance. That includes another $1.5 billion for the Regional Tariff Response Initiative, $500 million in additional Business Development Bank of Canada liquidity, $2 billion for the Canada Strong Diversification Fund and $3.5 billion in rapid-response support for workers and employers. The government says these measures build on nearly $25 billion in tariff-related support introduced during the previous 18 months. For Unifor, however, financial assistance and retaliation address the immediate shock without necessarily solving the deeper problem of maintaining Canadian production.

Unifor Wants Canada to Turn Trade Defence Into Industrial Policy

Unifor National President Lana Payne has described the new counter-tariffs as a good initial response while arguing that much more must happen inside Canada. The union wants Ottawa to accelerate public procurement spending, establish national industrial strategies and push major Canadian corporations to purchase more domestically produced goods. That position reflects the scale of Unifor’s exposure: the organization represents about 320,000 workers nationally, including approximately 120,000 members in trade-dependent workplaces spanning manufacturing, energy and transportation.

The government has already moved in this direction. Its Buy Canadian procurement framework took effect in December 2025, and since June 15, 2026, rules prioritizing Canadian suppliers and Canadian content have applied to strategic federal procurements worth at least $5 million, down from an earlier $25-million threshold. By June 25, the government reported that 14 contracts worth a combined $726.4 million had been awarded under the policy. Unifor’s argument is therefore less about creating a procurement strategy from scratch than dramatically increasing its speed and economic reach. In a prolonged trade war, the union wants government purchasing power to become a dependable source of demand for Canadian factories and their workers.

Employment Insurance Is Where the Union Sees Some of the Biggest Gaps

Ottawa has also expanded temporary Employment Insurance protections. The government is extending by one year the waiver of EI’s usual one-week waiting period and the measure allowing claimants to collect benefits without first exhausting separation payments such as severance or vacation pay. An additional 20 weeks of regular EI benefits for qualifying long-tenured workers is being extended for eight months. Another temporary rule will help certain workers who voluntarily left an earlier job but subsequently lost their most recent employment through no fault of their own.

Unifor says those changes provide useful relief but leave structural weaknesses untouched. Under regular EI rules, workers generally need between 420 and 700 insurable hours to qualify, depending on regional unemployment. Most claimants receive 55% of average insurable weekly earnings, with a 2026 maximum of $729 per week. Benefit duration normally ranges from 14 to 45 weeks. Unifor wants lower qualifying-hour requirements for workers in part-time, seasonal and precarious employment, higher benefit rates or a minimum benefit, and longer support that is not largely reserved for long-tenured workers. Government data underline the access issue: only 64.5% of unemployed Canadians in 2024 had paid EI premiums during the previous 52 weeks.

Manufacturing Data Explain Why the Union Is Pressing for More

The anxiety surrounding tariffs is not merely hypothetical. Statistics Canada found that manufacturing employment fell by almost 36,000 workers, or 2.3%, between December 2024 and December 2025. Employment in motor-vehicle-parts manufacturing dropped 9.3%, while motor-vehicle manufacturing declined 1.3%. Employment in iron and steel mills and ferro-alloy manufacturing fell 8.7%. At the same time, real manufacturing value added decreased 2.4%, with particularly sharp declines in parts manufacturing and primary metals.

Business responses tell a similar story. In the first quarter of 2026, 32.2% of Canadian businesses reported being negatively affected by U.S. tariffs during the previous year. Among manufacturers, the figure reached 50.6%. There have been signs of stabilization—the Labour Force Survey recorded an increase of about 11,000 manufacturing jobs in July 2026—but that does not remove the vulnerability created by trade uncertainty. For a worker deciding whether to buy a home, replace a vehicle or simply make long-term family plans, the difference between a temporary layoff and a permanent production shift matters enormously. That is why Unifor is emphasizing job retention rather than relying primarily on assistance after employment has already disappeared.

Canada’s Auto Industry Could Become the Biggest Test of the Strategy

Few sectors demonstrate the stakes as clearly as auto manufacturing. Unifor represents more than 40,000 workers across vehicle and powertrain assembly, parts manufacturing, distribution and related operations. The union has spent much of the trade dispute arguing that companies benefiting from access to Canadian consumers should maintain meaningful production in the country—a principle it has promoted through its “Sell Here. Build Here.” campaign. Ottawa, meanwhile, continues to impose 25% counter-tariffs on certain U.S.-made vehicles and has tied tariff relief for automakers to Canadian production and investment.

The risk could become much larger. Trump threatened on August 24 to raise U.S. tariffs on Canadian-made cars, trucks and automotive parts to 50% starting January 1, 2027. The threat came after negotiations that had contemplated reducing U.S. tariffs on Canadian vehicles from 25% to 15% broke down. Because North American vehicle production relies on components crossing borders repeatedly, tariffs can influence investment decisions long before a factory actually closes. Unifor’s position is that Canada cannot respond to that threat only by compensating workers after production moves. It wants policy strong enough to influence where companies build the next generation of vehicles in the first place.

The Longer the Trade War Lasts, the More Canada’s Economic Structure Matters

The central problem facing Ottawa is scale. Canada has made progress in diversifying trade, but the United States remains overwhelmingly important. Statistics Canada reported that 71.7% of Canadian merchandise exports went to the U.S. in 2025, even after that share fell from 75.9% a year earlier. Encouragingly, Canadian exports to countries outside the United States increased 17.2% in 2025. June 2026 data still showed roughly $53.9 billion of Canada’s $77.5 billion in monthly merchandise exports heading south of the border.

That makes Unifor’s criticism broader than a demand for tougher retaliation. Counter-tariffs can create leverage and protect domestic producers against an immediate competitive imbalance, but they cannot by themselves create customers, factories or replacement export markets. Carney’s government is pursuing diversification, infrastructure investment, procurement preferences and industrial supports alongside retaliation. The disagreement is increasingly about pace and scale. Unifor wants those measures powerful enough to keep investment and employment anchored in Canada while the trade relationship is being rewritten. If the confrontation with Washington persists, the ultimate measure of Ottawa’s response will not be the dollar value of goods placed under tariffs. It will be how many viable Canadian workplaces are still operating when the dispute finally ends.

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