Donald Trump’s claim that the U.S. doesn’t need anything from Canada is “simply false,” said Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada’s energy minister and a potential candidate in the contest to replace Justin Trudeau as prime minister.

The U.S. doesn’t have easy alternatives to Canadian crude oil, uranium, potash and other critical minerals, Wilkinson said. And he warned that nothing is off the table when it comes to potential Canadian trade retaliation, including export taxes.

At a news conference Tuesday, Trump repeated his pledge to put “very serious” tariffs on all Canadian imports. “We don’t need anything they have,” the president-elect told reporters about Canada.

Wilkinson will be in Washington next week and is working on lining up meetings with American lawmakers. He spoke to Bloomberg News in Canada’s Parliament on Wednesday, just outside the room where his Liberal Party caucus was meeting to discuss the rules of the impending leadership race.

What is your response to Trump saying the U.S. doesn’t need anything from Canada?

That’s simply false. The United States derives enormous economic value from Canada, and it does so with resources that it would have a very difficult time accessing from others.

If you look at oil, we provide heavy crude. Most of the crudes that are produced in the United States are light sweet crudes. The refineries in the Midwest are set up for heavy crude, and they have no alternative to the use of Canadian resources — not that’s economic. Even the alternative that exists for some of the Gulf refineries for heavy crude, it’s Venezuela. Are you really telling me the Americans are more interested in buying crude oil from Venezuela than from Canada?

It’s also true of critical minerals where we provide significant amounts and have the opportunity to provide much more. Their alternative is to buy from China. And that’s actually not an alternative in some cases, because the Chinese have banned the export of a certain number of critical minerals.

The same thing is true with uranium. The same thing is true with potash, where yes, they do have an alternative: it’s called Russia, which is not the most stable nor dependable source either. In the case of hydroelectricity, where there’s enormous trading on the West Coast and there’s enormous amounts of electricity that go from Quebec to particularly Boston and New York, there is no alternative.

Have you talked to Canadian oil industry leaders? What is their mindset right now?

Yeah, I’ve been talking to the CEOs of not just the oil sector, but folks in energy more broadly and in the resource sector, particularly in the minerals area. They are obviously concerned about the potential imposition of tariffs.

But they are also of the view, as am I, that there are ways to work with the Americans and work with companies in the United States to ensure that not just Canadians are speaking to Trump officials, but Americans are speaking to Trump officials about both the downsides of the tariffs and the upsides associated with additional collaboration going forward. So concern for sure, but there’s no panic. People are being quite strategic about this.

Can Canada allow a situation where Trump imposes broad-based tariffs but exempts oil?

We obviously are working to dissuade him from the tariffs generally. If he were to put in place broad-based tariffs that exclude energy, for example, Canada would still need to respond. There’s no way that Canada’s going to stand by and watch the decimation of our auto industry or other industries. We will need to respond in a thoughtful way, in ways that actually create maximum pressure on the president and on states that derive benefit from the trade they do with Canada. So I’m not sure it would fully change anything about our strategy.

Would export taxes on oil be on the table in a situation like that?

I don’t think anything’s off the table. But as I say, my first point of departure is to convince the administration that there’s more that we can do by collaborating together.

Look, if they put tariffs on oil, it will cause prices at the pumps to go up in the United States. There’s no way around that. If they put a tariff on electricity, on hydroelectricity, the price that consumers pay for electricity is going to go up. If they tariff potash, American food producers are going to have to pay that price and food prices in the United States are going to go up. Over a relatively short period of time, they are going to see increasing prices and increasing inflation. That’s the antithesis of what President Trump said he wanted to achieve when he was campaigning to be president.

And in that vein, there are a whole range of projects that we can put on the table that can actually help them. So for example, one of the critical minerals that was banned by China being shipped to the United States is germanium. There is a mine in Alaska that produces a concentrate that has germanium. It is processed at the Teck facility in Trail, British Columbia. There is an opportunity to significantly expand the amount of germanium that is produced through that. American mine, Canadian processing, used in the United States largely for defense applications — isn’t that a better way to think about how we leverage our relative capabilities than tariffing each other?

How do you get this message through to Trump and his circle?

Obviously, we may need to make the case to some of the folks that he talks to on a regular basis. That’s not just people who he’s appointing in his own administration, but it’s also some of the key senators like Lindsey Graham and others.

But I have always been of the view that Americans talking to Americans are going to be more effective than Canadians talking to Americans. So we are looking to work with our sector to activate all of those companies in the United States that have relations that can be effective in that lobbying effort.

That’s certainly associations like the American Petroleum Institute, but it’s also companies. ExxonMobil for example, the largest oil and gas company in the United States. It owns 70% of Imperial here. A lot of that product goes to refineries in the United States that Exxon owns. Exxon can be a very effective advocate for us. And that is true across the board.

_____

©2025 Bloomberg News. Visit at bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.