Tariffs on imports from Canada could cost Massachusetts up to $1 billion a year, Gov. Healey says
The opinions expressed below are Jon Keller's, not those of WBZ, CBS News or Paramount Global.
President Trump is set to announce new tariffs on U.S. trading partners on Wednesday. The markets have been reeling in anticipation, and many politicians are worried and angry, including Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey.
"[President Trump] is with his trade and tariff team right now perfecting it to make sure this is a perfect deal for the American people and the American worker," said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt late Tuesday as the nation braced for the announcement of Trump's accelerated tariff plan.
"That sounds good, doesn't it?" Healey said in an exclusive interview from her State House office. "But let me tell you what is going to happen (Wednesday). The president's going to announce tariffs, and what tariffs are, essentially, are a tax on everything that we buy, everything that we use."
What would new tariffs mean for Massachusetts?
What would a 20% tariff on Canadian imports mean to Massachusetts?
"It could cost $800 [million], $900 [million], a billion dollars a year, that we are going to pay, that consumers are going to pay. I mention housing. Where do you think our lumber comes from? It comes from Canada. So you're just going make it more expensive to build new housing, to do home renovations," Healey said.
"It's gonna be a tax on our energy. We've got hydro coming in from Canada, we've got other energy coming in from Canada, right? A 20% tax on that? It's going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars more. People's utility bills are going to go up. They're going to pay a lot more at the pump, and that's the effect of tariffs."
Will Trump pull back on tariffs?
Is Healey holding out any hope for a pullback before Wednesday afternoon?
"I sure hope so, because, I think ... look, the market is tanking, economists last week came out and said that Donald Trump is continuing to do things that are inflationary, that are raising costs and are getting us into trouble. So, I hope that cooler heads will prevail there. Donald Trump seems fixated on tariffs."
But the president argues he's just forcing a long-overdue shakeup of a system that has led to loss of manufacturing jobs and a damaging trade deficit in the United States.
What sort of political backlash is he risking? A huge one if it lingers.
President Trump's been promising that temporary pain will give way to extraordinary gain as foreign trade partners give in to his demands to cut better deals for the U.S. and corporations return their manufacturing jobs here.
But will that happen in time to save the political hides of Republicans who support him? That's the big political question in the short term.
