Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he’s “ripping up” a contract with Elon Musk’s Starlink that’s worth $100 million. Ford didn’t mince words in a press conference on Monday about why this was happening. “President Trump is the only person to be blamed,” he said. “Maybe Elon Musk can call his buddy? This is one of the ramifications.”
The Starlink contract was signed in November and set to go into effect over the summer. The plan was for Musk’s company to deliver high-speed internet to people in Ontario’s rural northern regions. “We’ll be ripping up the province’s contract with Starlink. Ontario won’t do business with people hellbent on destroying our economy,” Ford said.
“We haven’t paid a penny,” Ford said when pressed about his ability to cancel the contract by a journalist. “I’m not going to support someone that is hell-bent on destroying our province, destroying our families, taking jobs away from them. We’re done with that. We never started this fight…but we’re going to win this fight.”
The U.S. and America are in the early stages of a trade war. On February 1, Trump imposed a 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico. In retaliation, Canada announced its own 25% tariff on America and Ottawa has released a list of the affected products.
It’s a long list, and it’s a good bet that normal people in both America and Canada will bear the costs of Trump’s trade war. But the Canadian government is also working on targeting Trump’s closest allies as it gears up to fight back against U.S. monetary aggression. The list of tariffed goods includes a lot of stuff produced in Red states and Canadian liquor stores have pulled American booze off the shelves and put up signs encouraging people to “Buy Canadian Instead.”
“We just aren’t going to be using American companies,” Ford said during his press conference. “And no matter if we are building a hospital, if we’re building anything, if we’re building a dog house I want to make sure we are using Ontario steel, Canadian products, Canadian wood, Ontario wood, anything…I don’t care if it’s a toothpick. We need to purchase from Canada and Ontario.”
Further tariffs targeting Musk and other allies are on the table. After a decade in power, Liberal Party Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is leaving office and his party will choose a new leader in March. Musk and the trade war with America are hot topics on the campaign trail.
Liberal leadership candidate Chrystia Freeland told The Canadian Press that there should be a 100 percent tariff on Teslas and all U.S. booze. “We need to be very targeted, very surgical, very precise,” she said. “We need to look through and say who is supporting Trump and how we can make them pay a price for a tariff attack on Canada.”
“One of the characteristics of the Trump administration is they like to traffic in uncertainty,” Freeland added. “There are lots of reports about there being internal debates in the U.S., so let’s use that to our advantage. And let’s put some cards on the table and be very clear that if they hit us, we will hit them back.”
Trump also leveled a 25% tariff against Mexico over the weekend, but it’s been paused for 30 days following a phone call between Trump and Claudia Sheinbaum. According to Trump, the deal was done because Sheinbaum agreed to send 10,000 troops to the border to help police the flow of drugs between the countries.
