Michael Baumgartner

WASHINGTON – Rep. Michael Baumgartner and Eastern Washington business leaders met with a top Canadian diplomat in Spokane last week , the day after Canada’s counter-tariffs took effect in the escalating trade war prompted by the Trump administration’s sweeping use of import taxes to reshape the U.S. economy.

Baumgartner is one of 14 American lawmakers in the Canada-U.S. Inter-Parliamentary Group, established in 1959 as a forum to bring together members of the U.S. Congress with their counterparts in the Canadian Parliament. The Spokane Republican invited Craig Weichel, Canada’s consul general in Seattle, to the meeting with about 40 business leaders from the region.

“I’m not a fan of this trade war at all, and we need to have fair and well-understood and fairly enforced trade rules that provide businesses and farmers predictability,” Baumgartner said in an interview. “The ‘51st state’ stuff was, I think, unhelpful and needlessly antagonistic.”

President Donald Trump has irked Canadians by repeatedly suggesting their country should become the 51st U.S. state, renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America” and imposing tariffs on one of the United States’ top allies and trading partners – first in February 2025, then again in August after negotiations fell apart. Baumgartner noted that the “rally around the flag” effect stoked by Trump’s words and actions pushed Canadians in 2025 to elect Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose decision to lean into the trade war is widely popular in Canada.

“Canada is our most important trading partner and one of America’s most important strategic allies,” Baumgartner said, adding that many Democrats and Republicans agree the United States has become too dependent on China, and that Americans would benefit from more resilient trade relationships with U.S. allies in the Western Hemisphere.

“Canada is a really important part of that,” he said. “And certainly, those of us in Eastern Washington have long had a warm relationship with Canada.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., appointed Baumgartner in 2025 to the Canada-U.S. Inter-Parliamentary Group, a forum intended to promote relations between members of Congress and their counterparts in the Canadian Parliament. The group includes 12 House members, led by Republican Bill Huizenga of Michigan and Democrat Rick Larsen of northwestern Washington, plus two senators, Republican Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Democrat Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

The group includes 158 members of Canada’s Senate and House of Commons, more than a third of all Canadian legislators, indicating the importance of relations with the United States. Baumgartner said U.S. members have met individually with their Canadian counterparts, but the Americans haven’t had a group meeting with the Canadians since he joined in July 2025.

After Trump successfully pushed for a new trade deal between the United States, Mexico and Canada during his first term, his administration declined to renew that pact by a July 1 deadline and began talks with Canada toward a new agreement. Carney walked away from those talks in late August after he said U.S. negotiators had added last-minute demands that were “unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.”

The week before hosting the Canadian consul general in Spokane, Baumgartner said he and other lawmakers met in D.C. with Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative who led the American negotiators. The congressman said Greer told him the U.S. negotiators thought they had a really good deal with Canada, and then Carney took it to the premiers of Canada’s provinces and they walked away “for political reasons.”

Baumgartner said Greer told him the Trump administration wants Canada to have the lowest tariff rates of any U.S. trade partner. But while nearly every other country has responded to Trump’s aggressive tariff policy by bowing to U.S. demands, Carney has opted to fight back, promising to match “dollar for dollar” Trump’s taxes of up to 50% on $20 billion in Canadian exports to the United States.

So far, each country’s tariffs apply to a limited set of goods, leaving room for the trade war to escalate further. U.S. consumers face steep taxes on Canadian milk, honey, hockey sticks and more. Canada’s tariffs apply to American steel, dairy, electronics and other goods.

“WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform after trade talks broke down in August, but the two nations’ economies are deeply intertwined. The United States and Canada trade over $2.5 billion in goods and services each day, according to the U.S. International Trade Administration.

Baumgartner pointed out that Avista gets most of its natural gas to supply Northwest homes from Canada and much of the aluminum rolled at Kaiser Aluminum’s facility in Spokane Valley comes from Canada. Trump’s tariffs notably don’t apply to Canadian oil, gas, critical minerals or potash for fertilizer, which American farmers heavily depend on.

Alex McGregor, chairman of a Colfax-based agricultural company, was at the meeting with Weichel, the Canadian consul general. Baumgartner said the McGregor Company not only relies on Canadian potash to fertilizer, but it also exports much of that finished product back to Canada. McGregor also emphasized in the meeting that cross-border trade needs consistent water levels in the Columbia River, which is governed largely by the Columbia River Treaty, a 60-year-old pact the two countries are currently renegotiating.

Baumgartner said it’s vital that U.S.-Canada relations don’t degrade to the point of jeopardizing joint security operations, like the NORAD aerospace defense organization. Tourism from Canada is also important to Eastern Washington’s economy, he said.

Polls show more than 75% of Canadians support Carney’s decision to walk away from trade talks with the United States, and the prime minister’s approval rating has reached as high as 70%, nearly twice as high as the percentage of Americans who tell pollsters they approve of Trump.

The trade war is complicating what was already a tough election year for Republican members of Congress, who already faced stiff political headwinds. While Baumgartner represents a safely Republican district, his opponent, Democrat Carmela Conroy, hopes to fare better in a rematch of their 2024 race, when Baumgartner won more than 60% of the vote.

The trade war factored heavily into a debate between Baumgartner and Conroy on Wednesday, co-sponsored by The Spokesman-Review and KSPS.

In an interview Friday, Conroy said she agrees with the Wall Street Journal’s famously conservative editorial board, which has called Trump’s approach to Canada “the dumbest trade war in history.” She said Baumgartner saying he doesn’t like the trade war is less important than his votes in Congress, where he has voted multiple times against measures that would have rebuked the president’s trade war.

In February, retiring Rep. Dan Newhouse of Sunnyside was one of six Republicans who helped pass a resolution to overturn the existing tariffs on Canadian goods. Baumgartner voted against that measure, saying he had “concerns about the economic impacts of tariffs” but voted no at the request of Johnson, the House speaker.

“He asked me to continue to give the president leverage to use tariffs as a national security tool,” Baumgartner said in a statement at the time. “These tariffs help America to stem the flow of fentanyl from the Canadian border, but more generally the president continues to wield tariffs as an effective measure to put pressure on the governments of Russia and Iran.”

That February vote didn’t relate to tariffs on Russia or Iran, and Conroy rejected the idea that Congress can do little about the Trump administration’s trade policy, pointing out the U.S. Constitution gives lawmakers authority over tariffs. The trade war with Canada, she said, should be understood as the policy of the Republicans who control not just the White House but also Congress.

“I started hearing in 2025 how much the friction with Canada was costing us,” Conroy said, citing the example of provincial liquor stores in British Columbia rejecting American wine and spirits in response to the first round of Trump’s tariffs. “I heard from wine producers in Eastern Washington that they had lost 40% of their market. Not their export market; 40% of their total sales had gone to Canada.”

Baumgartner said that while he doesn’t like the trade war, there “definitely is some unfairness” in Canada’s trade policies, such as subsidies to Canadian softwood lumber that American timber producers have long accused of undercutting the U.S. market.

Conroy said she has heard the same complaint from her brother-in-law, a millwright, but she emphasized that raising the price of lumber also affects costs to consumers, including new housing. Citing her experience as a trade negotiator during her career in the U.S. Foreign Service, the Democrat said she’s not opposed to renegotiating the deal Trump struck with Canada and Mexico during his first term, but she wants the talks to be handled professionally.

“Mr. President, let’s go back to that deal that you struck last time you were in office and live with that until we can get another deal negotiated,” she said. “Let’s not pick a fight.”

For his part, Baumgartner said he would continue to make relations with Canada a priority as long as he remains in Congress.

“In the medium term, I’m very optimistic about good trade relationships between America and in Canada,” he said. “I thought we were going to be there a few weeks ago until this deal fell apart at the last minute, but I think there’s a lot of reasons to think that it’s a strong relationship that’s going to continue to be strong and warm.”