It’s already practically uneconomical to so, Canada produces about 4x more Aluminium than the US and the US imports about 80% of the Canadian production.
Canada doesn’t have to budge on this one, the US can’t just spin up that much Aluminium production in any reasonable time line, they’re going to keep importing it and just paying the tariff themselves.
Not just aluminum, but building factories for anything takes years nowadays. The sheer amount of equipment needed alone is staggering, not to mention that such equipment is usually made from steel and aluminum and is often foreign made.
And this is presuming that the owners want to build the factory as fast as possible. There’s quite a few from Biden’s incentives that are still not anywhere near ready to start producing anything. And that’s presuming that anybody has confidence that the economic environment will stay stable enough to make such a multi-decade investment worthwhile and won’t be reversed because of unexpected tariffs.
Would be a shame if Canada had to up the price to make up for the slump in sales. It costs a lot of money to run a smelter and lower production increases the overhead per ton of product.
We could stack export tariffs on there. Bureaucratically difficult since we currently don’t really do export tariffs. But it would be an interesting political response.
Aluminum uses a lot of electricity to manufacture too.
Sure would be a shame if it suddenly became uneconomical to manufacture in the US.
It’s already practically uneconomical to so, Canada produces about 4x more Aluminium than the US and the US imports about 80% of the Canadian production.
Canada doesn’t have to budge on this one, the US can’t just spin up that much Aluminium production in any reasonable time line, they’re going to keep importing it and just paying the tariff themselves.
Not just aluminum, but building factories for anything takes years nowadays. The sheer amount of equipment needed alone is staggering, not to mention that such equipment is usually made from steel and aluminum and is often foreign made.
And this is presuming that the owners want to build the factory as fast as possible. There’s quite a few from Biden’s incentives that are still not anywhere near ready to start producing anything. And that’s presuming that anybody has confidence that the economic environment will stay stable enough to make such a multi-decade investment worthwhile and won’t be reversed because of unexpected tariffs.
Would be a shame if Canada had to up the price to make up for the slump in sales. It costs a lot of money to run a smelter and lower production increases the overhead per ton of product.
We could stack export tariffs on there. Bureaucratically difficult since we currently don’t really do export tariffs. But it would be an interesting political response.