Last month, the Trump administration slammed Canada’s biggest manufacturer, Bombardier, with a 220 percent tariff on their new C-series passenger jetliner. Delta Airlines has an order of 75 airplanes from the company. That got the attention of Chicago-based Boeing, which claims that Canadian government subsidies to Bombardier meant that the aircraft couldn’t compete fairly.

The governments of Canada and Quebec bailed Bombardier out from bankruptcy last year. The Canadian government argued that Boeing’s defense contracts and manufacturing tax credits from Washington State are hardly different from their support for Bombardier. Airbus, the preferred competitor of Boeing in the U.S., is now buying a majority stake in the C-series to keep the Delta deal intact and their competition fresh after lukewarm sales of their A380 Jumbo Jet. 

The Boeing-Bombardier trade war is happening amid the biggest trade talks the U.S. and Canada have held in decades. Officials from both side of the border have been meeting to renegotiate NAFTA, a promise Trump made during his presidential campaign. 

Mark A. A. Warner, an international competition, trade, and investment attorney, says the Bombardier-Boeing issue points to larger, longstanding trade issues between the U.S. and Canada that NAFTA has never been able to adequately address. Warner joins Worldview to discuss the U.S.-Canada trade relationship.