In Washington to talk about trade and 'absurd' tariffs, Freeland says 'facts matter'

Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland ventured Wednesday onto President Donald Trump's home turf, denouncing his "absurd" tariffs and forcefully arguing for preservation of the world's rules-based order — with or without the United States.

Freeland reiterated Canada's strong opposition to the American president's steel and aluminum tariffs after meeting with the influential U.S. Senate foreign relations committee in Washington on Capitol Hill.

She was the first Canadian politician to set foot in the American capital after Trump and two of his top economic advisers launched unprecedented personal attacks on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for criticizing the tariffs at the weekend G7 summit in Quebec.

The minister stayed above the fray on those attacks, but she did not hesitate to repeat Canada's opposition to the tariffs in the bluntest of terms — in particular the use of Section 232 of U.S. trade law to justify the action on national security grounds.

...Canada's top diplomat broadened her focus with a sweeping defence of ...the international rules-based system that the U.S. led in creating after the Second World War.

She told a crowd of diplomats, academics and politicians from the White House that she realizes that some Americans no longer think that world order is of any benefit to them, even though they helped create it and wrote "the biggest cheques" to support it...

...Freeland said Canada was responding [with retaliatory tariffs] in sorrow rather than anger but that the government would respond dollar-for-dollar to the U.S. tariffs...

Earlier, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale told a Fox News business show that despite the dispute over the tariffs Canada still wants to make a deal to resolve the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

On Thursday, Freeland is expected to meet U.S. trade czar Robert Lighthizer in an effort to keep the NAFTA renegotiation on the rails.

This is excerpted from 13 June 2018 edition of the CBC News.