(Bloomberg) -- US President Donald Trump said trade talks with Canada are not a focus for his administration right now, and instead of negotiating a deal he may decide to just leave import taxes in place.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Trump Awards $1.26 Billion Contract to Build Biggest Immigrant Detention Center in US

The High Costs of Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful’ New Car Loan Deduction

Can This Bridge Ease the Troubled US-Canadian Relationship?

Salt Lake City Turns Winter Olympic Bid Into Statewide Bond Boom

Trump Administration Sues NYC Over Sanctuary City Policy

“We haven’t really had a lot of luck with Canada,” Trump told reporters Friday morning.

“I think Canada could be one where they’ll just pay tariffs, not really a negotiation,” he added. “We don’t have a deal with Canada. We haven’t been focused on that.”

The Canadian dollar had little immediate reaction to the remarks, which were similar to previous comments by the president. It was down 0.6% on the day to C$1.3717 per US dollar as of 1:06 p.m. in New York.

The president’s statements come a day after Canadian officials held a series of meetings in Washington with Republican senators. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also met Wednesday night with Dominic LeBlanc, the Canadian minister in charge of US trade.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has also lowered expectations recently of reaching a deal with Trump by Aug. 1, saying Canada won’t sign a bad agreement just to get one done.

Canadian officials are under less pressure to get a trade deal immediately because most products are currently exempt from US tariffs if they’re shipped under the rules of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, the pact Trump signed in his first term.

However, Trump has imposed steep new taxes on imports of Canadian steel, aluminum and autos, and Carney’s team has focused on trying to get those eliminated or reduced.

“I think it is clear that the US is focused on some of the larger deals it would like to get done, for example the EU and India,” said David Adams, chief executive officer of Global Automakers of Canada, which represents two Japanese companies that build vehicles in Canada, Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co., as well as other automakers such as BMW.

But Adams lambasted the Trump administration’s recent agreements with Japan and UK, which would give an advantage to cars and trucks assembled in those countries versus certain Canadian- or Mexican-made vehicles.

“It is somewhat unconscionable that the UK and Japan would have lower tariff rates applied to them than the US free trade agreement partners whose vehicles have at least 50% US content in them,” he said in an email. Honda and Toyota combined represent the majority of Canada’s vehicle production.

The US and Canada have one of the world’s largest bilateral trading relationships. The US imported about $477 billion of goods and services from Canada last year and exported $441 billion to Canada.

--With assistance from Mathieu Dion.

(Updates with comments from Global Automakers CEO, beginning in the ninth paragraph.)

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

Burning Man Is Burning Through Cash

Confessions of a Laptop Farmer: How an American Helped North Korea’s Wild Remote Worker Scheme

It’s Not Just Tokyo and Kyoto: Tourists Descend on Rural Japan

Elon Musk’s Empire Is Creaking Under the Strain of Elon Musk

A Rebel Army Is Building a Rare-Earth Empire on China’s Border

©2025 Bloomberg L.P.