U.S. Ambassador Hoekstra visits Northeast Ohio to address Canadian tariff uncertainty
By Abbey Marshall
U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra is in Northeast Ohio this week meeting with companies bracing for economic fallout from a deepening trade standoff with the state’s largest trade partner.
The visit comes as Canada prepares to impose retaliatory tariffs on $20 billion in American imports — much of which moves through the Great Lakes region, which accounts for nearly 40% of all U.S.-Canada cross-border trade.
Hoekstra was invited by Team NEO, the region’s JobsOhio partner focused on business attraction and retention.
“We’re not advocating for or against any policies,” said Team NEO Chief Executive Officer Matt Dolan. “We’re just simply saying our businesses want to get an update on what’s happening.”
A Crain’s Cleveland Business reporter was scheduled to interview Hoekstra at Team NEO on Wednesday morning, Sept. 2, but shortly before the meeting, the interview was canceled. The U.S. Embassy in Ottawa later informed the reporter that “D.C. added additional layers of review” that led to the cancelation.
Hoekstra, a former Michigan congressman and U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands during President Donald Trump’s first term, arrived Monday, Aug. 31. He visited the Port of Cleveland, a key conduit for cross-border trade, and plans to visit Akron-headquartered tiremaker Goodyear on Wednesday afternoon. Dolan said Hoekstra has had several other “one-on-one meetings” with businesses in the region.
Dolan said the Great Lakes region is especially poised to be affected by the stand-off between Trump and Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose constituents are overwhelmingly supportive of the Canadian leader’s hard stance against the president who has made repeated comments about intentions to annex the country as the 51st state and a recent executive order renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America.
Dolan said companies are not concerned about the “noise” and “jabs” between the leaders, but rather how a trade war will impact costs and business decisions going forward.
“They pay attention to their bottom line, and right now uncertainty impacts their bottom line,” Dolan said. “They have to make decisions three, five years from now. … So whatever’s said on Tuesday isn’t going to impact them. What’s going to impact them is: ‘I don’t know what the next two years look like, and therefore we have to make production decisions now.’”
Canada is Ohio’s largest export market: last year, the state sent roughly $17.5 billion in exports — nearly a third of its overall exports — and received $16 billion in imports. That makes Ohio particularly vulnerable to economic fallout should the tariffs go into effect.
“Those industries — because of their proximity to Canada who rely on exporting their products into Canada, if this continues — it has that risk,” Dolan said.
Asked if the companies Team NEO was representing were pleased with Hoekstra’s responses, he said they were “uniformly pleased” at a Monday night reception with the ambassador.
“Companies were pleased that we brought him in so they could have the discussion, so they could hear from him,” he said. “We knew that not everybody was going to agree with what he said, and he knew that too.”