The president tells a Kansas rally he no longer plans to bar Bombardier from the American market, and the reason he gives is the one Canadian exporters have been making for a year: the Canadian company is also an American employer
MONTREAL, Oct. 21, 2026
President Donald Trump has abandoned his threat to bar Bombardier Inc. from selling aircraft in the United States, telling an election rally outside Wichita, Kan., that he does not intend to harm the Canadian manufacturer because of the jobs it supports in that state.
“We’re not hurting them if they’re in Kansas,” the president said of Bombardier late Monday, Oct. 19, according to Reuters, while continuing to describe it as “a Canadian company.” The remarks came more than a month after he said in September that Bombardier would not be permitted to sell into the American market unless it moved production to the United States.
Bombardier shares rose on the Toronto Stock Exchange on Tuesday following the comments. Reuters reported a gain of 2.1 per cent; other reporting put the move at about 4.5 per cent, with the stock closing at $325.32. Neither Bombardier nor the White House commented immediately.
The reversal is a small event in a conflict that has produced 50 per cent duties on roughly US$20 billion in Canadian exports, outright import prohibitions on Canadian alcohol and dairy lines, and an effective American tariff rate on Canadian goods that has risen to 7.7 per cent from 5.3 per cent since June. But it is instructive out of proportion to its size, because of why it happened.
What changed the president’s mind
By the accounts that have emerged, the decisive factor was not a trade argument advanced from Ottawa. It was a phone call from Washington.
Kansas lawmakers contacted the White House after the September threat, among them Republican Senator Roger Marshall, who faces a difficult re-election campaign with the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 3. Reuters reported that those calls prompted the reconsideration, and Canadian reporting has said the president credited a call from Marshall specifically with changing his view.
The underlying facts are the ones Bombardier has been publicising for a year. The company employs roughly 1,500 people in the Wichita area, where Bombardier Defense and the company’s U.S. headquarters are located. It has about 3,500 employees in the United States overall, more than 40 per cent of them in Wichita, with additional facilities in Texas, California and elsewhere, and a planned site in Fort Wayne, Ind. The company recently announced a further US$50 million investment in its Wichita operations, including a training centre for technicians and mechanics.
In September, Bombardier said it pays more than US$2.5 billion a year to about 2,800 American suppliers across 47 states, a web of purchasing it says indirectly supports tens of thousands of American jobs. Analysts estimate that most Bombardier aircraft contain at least 40 per cent American-made content. More than half of the company’s revenue comes from U.S. customers. Final assembly of the Challenger and Global business jets takes place in Canada.
Those figures describe a company that is Canadian by domicile and North American by operation, which is the condition of a great many firms caught in this dispute. What distinguishes Bombardier is that its American footprint is concentrated in a single congressional map at a moment when that map matters.
A threat that was always hard to execute
There was also a practical problem with the September threat that was noted at the time and never resolved: it was unclear what legal instrument would have accomplished it.
Bombardier’s business jets hold type certificates issued by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. Airworthiness certification is a technical and safety function governed by bilateral aviation safety agreements, not a trade lever, and an attempt to withdraw certification for commercial reasons would have invited immediate litigation and considerable alarm among American operators of the several thousand Bombardier aircraft already flying in the United States.
The tariff route was also partly closed. The Section 338 proclamations that underpin the 50 per cent duties on Canadian goods expressly exclude goods covered by the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade in Civil Aircraft, along with products already subject to Section 232 metals duties. Civil aircraft were carved out from the beginning.
This is not the first time the aircraft file has produced a threat that did not materialise. In February, the president threatened to decertify Bombardier aircraft amid a dispute involving the American manufacturer Gulfstream Aerospace, a threat that was never carried out; Transport Canada eventually approved the American-built aircraft at issue. In January, he had threatened a 50 per cent tariff on Canadian aircraft sold in the United States, a threat that sent Bombardier stock sharply lower at the time.
A pattern has emerged over the year in which aerospace is repeatedly named and rarely acted upon. For an industry that plans on decade-long horizons, the repetition is itself a cost.
The wider conflict
The Bombardier reprieve stands against a bilateral relationship that has otherwise hardened.
Negotiations collapsed on Aug. 22, when Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended talks, describing the American side’s late demands as unreasonable and calling the new tariffs a miscalculation. Hours later, Section 338 duties took effect at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time, imposing 50 per cent on more than 550 subheadings of the U.S. tariff schedule. The authority, Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, had never previously been used by a president; analysts noted it had not been seriously invoked in at least 70 years. CUSMA origin provides no exemption.
Canada responded on Sept. 8 with countermeasures matching the American structure at 15, 25 and 50 per cent across a list covering $27.6 billion in U.S. imports. Steel and aluminum moved to 50 per cent from 25, joined at that rate by furniture, clothing and apparel; appliances, cheese and certain metal derivatives came in at 25 per cent. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said at the time: “When the United States asked too much and offered too little, we chose to stand up for Canadians.”
Washington escalated the same day. Five further proclamations adjusted the covered lists as of Sept. 15, dropping rock salt and cement while adding all-terrain vehicles and additional dairy products, and converted duties into outright import bans effective Sept. 29 on a defined set of alcoholic beverages in consumer packaging, specified whey and molasses products, non-alcoholic beer, and motorcycles with engines above 800 cubic centimetres. No action was taken against Bombardier in that round.
The situation has since settled into a standoff. CBC News reported on Oct. 20, citing sources, that Canadian officials have told industry groups there are no substantial negotiations under way and that no agreement is expected before the U.S. midterm elections, with the White House focused on campaigning. Brian Clow, a former deputy chief of staff in the Prime Minister’s Office, was quoted saying the window for a pre-election deal has closed and that a Democratic win in Congress would bring only marginal benefit to Canada, since the tariff powers in use are executive ones.
Separately, the trade fight has entered the courts. On Oct. 20, Gellert Global Group, a New Jersey food importer with about US$1.7 billion in annual revenue, sued in the U.S. Court of International Trade to void the Section 338 duties, arguing that later trade statutes displaced the 1930 provision and that the administration skipped the required 30-day waiting period when it added products in September. The company says it paid more than US$520,000 in duties between Sept. 16 and Oct. 11.
The economic backdrop
Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer released her October outlook on Oct. 20 and cut her growth forecast, citing the trade measures.
Real GDP growth is now projected at 0.9 per cent in 2026 and 1.5 per cent in 2027, down from 1.1 and 1.6 per cent in June. “Canada faces a more challenging economic and fiscal outlook than we projected in June,” Parliamentary Budget Officer Annette Ryan said, adding that “additional trade measures and ongoing uncertainty are weighing on growth in real output.”
If the current bilateral measures were to become permanent, the office estimates Canadian real GDP would be about 1.4 per cent smaller after five years than in a scenario where 2024 trade conditions had persisted, with employment as much as 185,000 lower at the trough, a peak shortfall of 0.9 per cent reached six quarters after the modelled shock. The deficit is projected at $63.3 billion in 2026-27, peaking at $70.2 billion in 2027-28, with the debt-to-GDP ratio rising from 40.8 per cent to 42.6 per cent by 2030-31.
Statistics Canada reported employment down 68,000 in September with unemployment at 6.5 per cent, although a sharp decline in public sector hiring accounted for part of that.
Aerospace sits awkwardly in those numbers. It is one of Canada’s largest advanced manufacturing exporters, heavily concentrated in Quebec, and it has so far avoided the direct tariff exposure that has hit metals, forestry, food processing and consumer goods. What it has not avoided is uncertainty, and uncertainty is the variable the budget office identifies as weighing on investment.
Bombardier in the Canadian export picture
To understand why a single company’s exemption registers as national news in Canada, it helps to see where aerospace sits in the export base.
Aerospace is among the most valuable manufacturing export categories Canada has, measured by value added rather than tonnage, and it is one of a short list of sectors in which Canadian firms hold globally competitive positions rather than acting as suppliers to American primes. Bombardier, having exited commercial aviation and rail, now builds large-cabin business jets and defence variants, a segment where it competes directly with Gulfstream and Dassault.
That competitive position explains both the threat and its withdrawal. A 50 per cent duty, or an outright market ban, would have handed Gulfstream the North American large-cabin market. It would also have stranded an American supply base of 2,800 firms that build to Bombardier’s specifications, and left several thousand aircraft already in American service dependent on a manufacturer suddenly barred from the market that supports them.
Business aviation is also an unusually mobile market. Aircraft are internationally traded assets that can be registered, based and resold across jurisdictions, and a customer prevented from buying new in the United States has options that a buyer of, say, cement does not. A ban would have been difficult to enforce and easy to route around, which is a further reason it was never likely to be implemented as described.
The negotiation that is not happening
Behind the aerospace story sits the absence of any negotiation into which it might be folded.
Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc has maintained throughout the autumn that the two governments remain in contact. That is not the same thing as talks. CBC News reported on Oct. 20 that Canadian officials had told industry groups there were no substantial negotiations under way.
The underlying disagreements have not moved since August. They include the Section 232 duties on steel, aluminum and autos; Canada’s dairy tariff-rate quotas and the supply management system behind them; provincial restrictions on American alcohol, which eight of ten provinces maintain; and Canada’s request for a CUSMA-based exemption. Late in the August round, the American side introduced further demands, including constraints on Canada’s ability to negotiate independent trade agreements with third countries and conditions touching cultural and streaming regulation. An auto concession was floated that would have cut the Section 232 rate on non-U.S. content from 25 to 15 per cent, but it reportedly covered passenger cars only.
The structural problem is that several of the practices Washington has cited are within provincial jurisdiction. Saskatchewan’s additional 50 per cent levy on American alcohol, announced Aug. 27, was among the measures named in the September proclamations as evidence that Canada had not removed the practices at issue. Ottawa cannot trade away what it does not control, and provinces facing tariff damage in their own industries have little incentive to disarm unilaterally.
Meanwhile the structure around the relationship has weakened. The first joint review of CUSMA on July 1, 2026 did not produce the 16-year extension business groups in all three countries had sought. The agreement remains in force through at least July 1, 2036, but the parties now face annual reviews beginning in 2027, and the U.S. Trade Representative opened a comment process in October ahead of the next one. An agreement reviewed every year is a less reliable foundation for a 20-year capital decision than one reviewed every six.
Reactions
Reaction in Canada has been measured, and the restraint is deliberate.
Industry representatives have welcomed the removal of a threat without treating it as a policy change, on the reasoning that a threat withdrawn in a rally speech can be reinstated in one. Quebec’s aerospace cluster, which supplies Bombardier’s final assembly operations, had been bracing for disruption since September and will continue contingency planning.
The episode has also sharpened an argument Canadian industry groups have been making in Washington for a year: that tariffs on Canadian goods fall substantially on American workers and American suppliers, because the two manufacturing economies are not separable at the firm level. Bombardier’s own numbers, 2,800 suppliers across 47 states and US$2.5 billion in annual American purchasing, were assembled precisely to make that case. The argument did not prevail in the dairy, alcohol or motor vehicle files. It prevailed here, when it was delivered by a senator in a contested race.
That is a lesson Canadian trade advocacy has largely already absorbed. Provincial delegations, sectoral associations and Canadian consulates have spent much of the year mapping Canadian supply relationships onto American congressional districts. The Bombardier outcome is evidence that the approach works, within limits.
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business, which estimates that 53,112 Canadian small firms are directly affected by American tariffs, Canadian counter-tariffs or both, has pointed out that most of them have no such lever. Corinne Pohlmann, the federation’s executive vice-president for advocacy, has argued that federal relief programs “continue to exclude about half of the small business community” and that “programs that only help a few thousand businesses are unacceptable when tens of thousands need support.” A machine shop in Ontario with 40 employees and no American plant cannot arrange a phone call from a senator.
What it means for exporters and importers
Five practical points follow for Canadian firms and their American counterparties.
First, the civil aircraft carve-out is real and should be relied upon carefully rather than casually. The Section 338 annexes exclude goods covered by the WTO Agreement on Trade in Civil Aircraft, but the exclusion operates at the level of tariff classification, not corporate identity. Aerospace suppliers shipping parts that fall outside the agreement’s coverage, including ground support equipment, tooling, furnishings and certain raw and semi-finished materials, may still be caught. Classification review line by line is the only reliable method.
Second, the annexes change. They were amended on Sept. 15 to remove rock salt and cement and to add all-terrain vehicles and dairy lines, and they were amended again when the import prohibitions were created. A scope determination made in July is not current. Exporters should be checking shipments against the current U.S. Customs and Border Protection guidance rather than against a summer analysis.
Third, document the American footprint and make it legible. The Bombardier case demonstrates that the most effective instrument available to a Canadian exporter in this environment is a credible, specific account of what it buys and whom it employs in the United States, organised by state and congressional district. That is a communications exercise, but it is built on procurement data, and firms that have never compiled it should.
Fourth, do not plan on reversals. A threat withdrawn verbally is not a legal change, and nothing in the president’s Kansas remarks altered any proclamation, annex or customs instruction. The threatened 50 per cent duty on autos and auto parts remains scheduled for Jan. 1, 2027. Firms with exposure to that measure should be modelling it as it stands.
Fifth, use the relief that exists. Canada’s counter-tariff framework retains a remission process under section 115 of the Customs Tariff for exceptional cases, and the August federal package added $7.5 billion on top of nearly $25 billion already committed: $1.5 billion more through the Regional Tariff Response Initiative, a $500 million liquidity stream through the Business Development Bank’s Pivot to Grow program with the minimum revenue threshold cut to $1 million, $2 billion through the new Canada Strong Diversification Fund for shovel-ready capital maintenance at tariff-affected firms, $3.5 billion in rapid response supports for workers and employers, and added flexibility in the Large Enterprise Tariff Loan facility.
What to watch
The immediate question is whether the Bombardier reprieve survives Nov. 3. The reasoning that produced it, that a Canadian company employing Americans in a state with a contested Senate race should not be targeted, is tied to a calendar. After the midterms the political calculation changes, and the firms that are currently shielded by it may find the shield has moved.
The larger question is whether the logic generalises. If the administration is prepared to accept that a Canadian manufacturer with 3,500 American employees and 2,800 American suppliers is not a suitable target, it is not obvious why the same reasoning should stop at the aerospace sector. Canadian steel, aluminum, forestry and food processing firms all sustain American employment through downstream customers, and all have been saying so for a year.
For now, Bombardier has a reprieve, Canadian aerospace has an uncertain quiet, and the rest of the Canadian export economy is still paying. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc says the two governments remain in contact. Nobody expects a deal before November.