President Donald Trump told business leaders Monday he would impose a “very major” border tax on companies that move jobs outside the U.S. and said he would cut regulations by 75 percent. A breakfast meeting with corporate executives at the White House kicked off the first working day of a president who made the promise of greater economic opportunity for American workers a centerpiece of his campaign. Trump continued the theme Monday by signing an order withdrawing the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. He will meet in the afternoon with labor leaders and U.S. workers, an administration official said. The meeting, with an advisory panel on manufacturing led by Dow Chemical Co. Chief Executive Officer Andrew Liveris, welcomed some of the nation’s most prominent corporate leaders to the White House. During the transition, Trump at times used his new power as a cudgel against companies that provoked his ire with plans to move jobs overseas or with prices for weapons systems he considered excessive. The president effusively praised the business leaders as “great people,” yet put them on notice that he was serious about the warnings he issued during his campaign and transition against moving production overseas. “If you go to another country” and cut U.S. jobs “we are going to be imposing a very major border tax” on that product, he told the executives. Mexican, Canadian Reactions In the other countries that make up the balance of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which the president has vowed to re-open, Trump’s pronouncements drew a defensive response from Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and a more circumspect comment from Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s foreign minister. “We should preserve free trade between Canada, the United States and Mexico,” Pena Nieto said in a speech from his residence in Mexico City some hours after Trump’s statements. “The commercial exchange between the three countries must be exempt of any tariff or quota.” Pena Nieto is scheduled to meet with Trump at the White House on Jan. 31. Freeland, speaking to reporters before the start of a cabinet meeting in Calgary on Monday, said the administration of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is “focused this morning on the Canada-U.S. relationship.” “We have a very strong relationship with Mexico that was cemented with a great bilateral meeting this summer,” Freeland said. “We are very happy to be members of what I believe, and what I think Canadians know to be, is a very mutually beneficial Nafta partnership. But of course, our relationship with the United States is primarily a bilateral relationship and I think Canadians know and understand that.” Eye on Automakers Among those in the room was Mark Fields, president and CEO of Ford Motor Co., which canceled plans to build a $1.6 billion plant in Mexico after Trump criticized the company during the campaign for plans to move small-car production from the U.S. to Mexico. Ford announced its plan to scrap the Mexico plant hours after Trump posted a tweet threatening to punish automaker General Motors Co. for building a factory in Mexico, though Ford said at the time its decision was unrelated. No executive from General Motors was included in the breakfast meeting. Pat Morrissey, a spokesman for GM, said company CEO Mary Barra is on a different Trump White House economic advisory council, the President’s Strategic and Policy Forum. Trump mostly projected an optimistic tone Monday. “What we want to do is bring manufacturing back,” he said, highlighting tax-cut plans he said would rev up economic growth. Massively Massive “We are going to be cutting taxes massively for both the middle class and for companies, and that’s massive,” Trump said. He suggested that a roll-back of business regulations would be a particular focus of his economic plan, saying his observation has been that “regulation wins” over tax cuts as the more important factor in promoting growth. Liveris told reporters afterward that the corporate executives and Trump team talked about the proposed border tax “quite a bit” and, in particular, “about the sorts of industries that would be helped or hurt by that.” “I would take the president at his word here: He’s not going to do anything to harm competitiveness,” Liveris said. “He’s going to actually make us all more competitive.” Listener-in-Chief Liveris said Trump “listened very carefully” about “how to actually get some action around fixing some of the issues that are embedded in creating American manufacturing jobs.” Though Trump had to take a call during the meeting, he reconvened the session in the Oval Office, Liveris said. Fields called the meeting “very, very positive.” Other business leaders meeting with Trump included Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Inc.; Jeff Fettig, chairman and CEO of Whirlpool Corp.; Alex Gorsky, chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson; Marillyn Hewson, chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp.; and Klaus Kleinfeld, chairman and CEO of Arconic Inc. Also participating were Mario Longhi, president and CEO of United States Steel Corp.; Elon Musk, chairman and CEO of Tesla Motors Inc.; Kevin Plank, CEO and founder of Under Armour Inc.; Mark Sutton, chairman and CEO of International Paper Co.; and Wendell Weeks, chairman and CEO of Corning Inc.