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This seems illogical. You can't simultaneously claim that the US is paying higher prices for Canadian goods because of US-imposed tariffs and then turn around and say only that Americans are paying a tax on buying Canadian goods on Canadian-imposed tariffs. Both countries are either paying higher prices or paying higher taxes. Canada's tariffs must also be viewed as America is taxing Canada back, or else neither can be viewed that way.
Separately you can go back prior to 2024, for example, and discuss monopolization of Canadian companies and import duties on American products which also must be treated in the same fashion for this analysis - Canadian imposed tariffs on dairy (I don't care about dairy other than it being an obvious example) would have to be claimed to be an American tax on Canadians for this to be consistent.
Whatever claim you would levy here, equally applies to Canada minus the dollar volumes depending on which country imports more and what products are imported since Canada is also implementing additional (because they've had tariffs for a while) tariffs on specific goods/services.
[1] https://www.farmprogress.com/farm-policy/the-real-story-behi...
That's why the USA has never reached the tarriff limit. The big producers there would just dump 20 million litres at once if they could. They aren't interested in 1 or two.
And if they were able to do that, the Canadian producers would go under. So its kinda simple, the Dairy Supply system is there to protect the Canadian Dairy industry. If it was removed, we would be flooded with cheap, low-quality US milk.
For example Canadian tariffs increase prices and their retaliatory tariffs also reduce demand for Canadian products leading to job losses.
It's really a singular achievement to piss off such a good neighbor so badly.
This whole trade war with Canada has to be one of the dumbest fucking things I have ever witnessed, and that's saying a lot given the complete incompetence and buffoonery of the current US administration. First they had to imitate Idiocracy with the the WFC fight on the White House lawn, now they're imitating South Park by killing relations with Canada. Heck, a big joke in the original South Park movie was that it was so inconceivable that of all countries Canada is the one we'd have a war with, but Trump just wants to speed run to every country on the planet hating our guts.
Summary quote from IMDB: "The U.S. President, low in the opinion polls, gets talked into raising his popularity by trying to start a cold war against Canada."
Sure that's fair, but on the other hand that's what was written and the framing I think is unfair and inconsistent. Of course, others may go along happily reading it and thinking wow we created these tariffs to raise prices and Canada decided to tax us!? That's worth clearing up and being honest about, in my view.
Imagine someone writes another article and frames it as though Americans are taxing Canadians with tariffs. Surely folks would want to "clear that up" wouldn't they?
You'd think that, strategically, a decapitation strike is the worst thing that could happen for a nation. However, that would be incorrect: the worst thing that could happen is this, a vain and incompetent buffoon installed in the top leadership position. With no leader you're just not making decisions, but the organization can continue operating under autonomous cells. With a hyperactive incompetent leader you're speedrunning every conceivable bad decision and everyone just has to look on in horror.
Well, Canada repeatedly elected Justin Trudeau (now departed)... so both countries have made some... interesting decisions...
Trump is taxing Americans when he imposes tariffs. Canada is taxing Canadians when they impose retaliatory tariffs.
And FWIW, most economists think retaliatory tariffs are stupid - on net they cause more harm to the retaliating country than if there were no retaliation. But the politics around tariffs are stupid too. It's all stupid.
Aside from that, the "obvious" dairy tariffs you speak of are almost entirely theoretical. Those are anti-dumping tariffs that kick-in only when a certain threshold has been met. It never has.
That's not to say there aren't trade barriers. The US side argues that there are market barriers that make reaching those quotas impossible [0]. It's a fair point and worth discussing. But let's call it what it is: it's a dispute about opening up a potential new market. Nobody has been over-charged and no American farmers have been "ripped off" (quoting DJT).
If the end result is the same, do the details matter? Absolutely. Being overcharged or ripped off is something that gets people heated, (which is exactly why Trump uses that inflammatory language). Being denied market access because of administrative hurdles to a small-ish niche in a relatively small market like Canada? Not so much.
Please don't repeat the falsehood that dairy tariffs are an "obvious" example of where Canada has imposed fees on American companies. The truth is more nuanced.
[0] https://www.farmprogress.com/farm-policy/the-real-story-behi...
It is. When Canada imposes retaliatory tariffs, it is of course a tax on Canadians. Though it is also a market inducement, and one of the complaints of the admin is that Canada's retaliatory vehicle tariffs -- literally mirroring the tariffs the US applied to Canada -- caused a 22% drop in imports.
> import duties on American products which also must be treated in the same fashion for this analysis - Canadian imposed tariffs on dairy
Can you tell us if those import duties are in the room with us? Because you know they didn't exist, right?
There have been $0 in tariffs on US dairy. The tariffs only come into play when the US imports pass a certain volume -- and precisely the same tariffs happen in both directions -- and the US hasn't. Now the US has complained that there are administrative barriers, and maybe so, but they sure aren't clear on what they are, and lie about everything constantly.
Prior to this trade war, there was essentially 0% tariffs on products from the US. And the only reason there is a trade "deficit" is because of massive amounts of Alberta oil that the US desperately needs. I mean, it's hilarious that Trump was literally celebrating bringing back Keystone XL, and increasing the flow of Alberta oil, while simultaneously complaining essentially about that very same oil.
This is, as the WSJ named it, the stupidest trade war in history. All for yet another distraction, as Trump's entire base just desperately need to puff their little chests and celebrate when they think he is punching down on someone. Even if it makes their lives worse and their lot worse.
> There have been $0 in tariffs on US dairy. The tariffs only come into play when the US imports pass a certain volume
So there are tariffs on US dairy... Maybe the US can just say well once 50 cars are shipped in from Canada we impose 300% duties. I'm not part of team Trump here or anything, but these kinds of arguments are semantics - at the end of the day neither Canada, China, the EU, or others who claim to be free-trade economies (in some sense) are really living up to the hype, whether that's outright tariffs, or complicated regulatory or policy schemes to circle around what amounts to a tax on foreign produced goods.
> This is, as the WSJ named it, the stupidest trade war in history.
Wall Street (and the WSJ) also helped move American jobs overseas. So are you aligning with corporate America's viewpoint on trade? They also want much lower corporate taxes. :)
> All for yet another distraction, as Trump's entire base just desperately need to puff their little chests and celebrate when they think he is punching down on someone. Even if it makes their lives worse and their lot worse.
I don't know that this is a distraction and it would be a mistake to dismiss these concerns out of hand as chest-pumping.
>Let's set the framing correctly because I think we're starting off on the wrong foot. The US is not in a desperate need of any product from Canada. Nice to have and super important? Yea. Desperate? No. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Literally yesterday:
“This country desperately needs aluminum,” Trump said. “Selfishly, we need aluminum in this country. We don’t have it. We get it all from Canada for the most part, and we need it badly.”
Note that Trump said this within hours of claiming "we don't need anything from Canada". What else does the country need that Trump has lied about (that you seem to have bought hook, line, and sinker)? Have you considered another source of information?
Well you can start with potash (very much a critical need according to the United States Ambassador to Canada), and oil (according to the US voters), electricity (according to several million American households).
That's not even to mention current and future supplies of critical minerals. Remember how much Trump panicked when China cut off critical minerals? You'd better hope that doesn't happen again.
The US oil stockpile is rapidly declining, it is desperately buying up bonds to try to prop up the market ($40T debt, deficit spiralling, and now your orange goblin is talking about using the military to prop up the bond market...which good God), and now Vance is running around trying to make lemonade out of lemons and talking up how no longer being the reserve currency is a great thing. Utter idiocracy.
Canada needs absolutely nothing from the US.
> I'm not part of team Trump here or anything, but these kinds of arguments are semantics
It isn't semantics when $0 in tariffs were applied. What an utterly stupid argument. And this was all precisely negotiated into USMCA -- you know, the trade deal that your hero called the best trade deal ever -- for which we gave concessions.
Trump takes advantage of his base being catastrophically stupid and misinformed, and what a case in point.
>I don't know that this is a distraction
It is 100% a distraction, for a monumentally stupid base.
Personally I want USMCA torn up, as a Canadian. Loads of Americans are catastrophically stupid -- the most impossibly misinformed group of people on this planet -- about how privileged you have been, and what you have to lose.
And a lot of Canada's trade MOUs with other countries basically requires they have this special privilege. So there's gonna be fallout everywhere.
I wouldn't personally want to own Canadian dollars right now but I think they'll get this figured out.
Canada is fighting Anchluss. The MAGA wing is entirely serious about annexing Canada.
Carney, for a change, is right. Canada is being attacked.
What do we need that shouldn't make domesticially?
First, when you list something like a financial figure, you must also include the relevant time period. E.g. you say 16.0B in taxes collected by Canada from American exporters. But you don't list the time period.
Second, you say 313 are taxed today. What is this in reference to? Goods? People? Companies? Percentage?
The labels need some serious love.
Which is to say that anybody with a $200 subscription and access to Namecheap and Netlify could have built the site in one hour flat. There's no longer any need for an NGO, media nonprofit, or lobbying group to build such things; the effort required has been reduced to near-zero, so anybody can do it.
Right but actually creating the thing is only half the story. You need to fact check it (especially with LLMs) promote it, approach journalists to bring it to their attention, etc etc etc.
In many ways making a web site has always been the easy part.
That's true... but with every day that passes it's increasingly less true. Today's best high-end LLMs are highly optimized towards fact checking themselves and each other. The winning move is to get a report from Claude and have both Kimi K3 and GPT-5.6-Pro adverserially review it. Then synthesize a fixed version with any one of them. Then adverserially review it again in incognito mode.
This sounds like a lot of work, but it takes literally two minutes of effort and it works amazingly well.
It's basically just documenting the utter stupidity of a trade war with a close ally with whom we are tightly coupled economically.
Because I don't want to click through to every data source to verify every figure and need some baseline level of trust about whether they've been correctly used.
If there's an error, I want to be able to contact the author somehow.
This strategy is going to fail and when it does countries will trade much more one with others currencies and less with USA and USD. When that happens the American house of cards will collapse because it will no longer be possible to print trillions of dollars and count on other countries to absorb them trusting in the American policies and agreements.
The printing dollars formula facing low single-digit inflation is coming to an end.
U all can downvote me like on the credit-card thread but this is the reality for those outside the big American walls.
Take this snippet for example:
What does "sits in headings Canada taxes" mean? Whatever this means, how does it jump to $26.5B from $16.0B on a single date? Don't things have to enter for tariffs to be collected?"See whose jobs" is even more confusing. Nothing about jobs was mentioned. It's talking, presumably about an increase in a tariff collected by Canada. I can understand this will affect certain jobs, but "See whose jobs" just confuses the situation more. I cannot figure out for the life of me what's going on.
Here's another example when you click the "nuclear option" it jumps, without context beyond "Canada’s energy supply is a fourth exposure, and a different kind" to this:
Am I really dumb for not understanding this site, or is this the infogram equivalent of a Nigerian prince email?You also might want to consider archiving the data if you aren't already given this administration's tendency to remove data that doesn't further their agenda.
The answer I keep coming back to is I know zero people who considered that.
Does the US have a trade imbalance that causes problems, particularly in our manufacturing sector? Yes. Can tariffs kind of help with that? Also yes. Really, you need to instill some sort of sense of duty to country in business leaders, which is a far heavier lift, but this at least puts a number to it.
Does picking a tariff fight with Canada, our closest cultural ally, solve the above problem to the point where it justifies the costs? Hell no.
America then refines it and exports it as finished product or uses it internally -- one of the reasons why America has relatively cheap gasoline prices.
This "trade imbalance" is a massive benefit to America.
So just to expand on why that's the case. As a net producer of energy right now, the US produces more than it consumes. This is why it get's pointed out, that as a net producer, the trade deficit with Canada is also a surplus (or reduction in deficit) on the other side with other countries. Yes it may not be the same physical barrel that is exported vs consumed, but in a fungible way they're commodities. If you separate out that portion, we (Canada) then buy more goods from the US then we sell. And that's also just the goods trade, not including services which the US also sells more of to Canada than the other way around.
I have a trade imbalance with the local grocery store: I buy lots of vegetables, but they don't buy mine.
My employer has a trade imbalance with me: They buy lots of my labor, but I never buy any of theirs.
The term has become unhelpfully pejorative, the "imbalance" is often desirable and beneficial.
Tariffs will not bring back manufacturing. They increase prices of inputs, reduce incentive for competitiveness and invite retaliation. Look how well tariffs have worked for Brazil and Argentina or for the US under Smoot Hawley.
The geopolitical calculations regarding China and the socioeconomic conditions of working class people in the Midwestern and Northeastern United States would beg to differ.
You need to have at least some control of your own manufacturing destiny for national security reasons, and you need somewhere for people with a high school diploma to work or they start dying deaths of despair.
It isn't just "which Americans consider trade with Canada to be a real issue," it is "which Americans think Canada should become a territory of the United States."
It's just plainly absurd. It is inexplicable to me that Congress doesn't act. And infuriating to me that my representatives in Congress don't do more (even though they are in the opposition.)
Canada has things that our economy needs desperately (e.g. potash).
If I were king of Canada, I would restrict supplies of such materials needed by red states.
Yes, because Canada has a lot of cheap oil which America wants. If you deduct oil, the trade deficit runs the other way.
Some things are bigger than money.
... which, come to think of it, is something that the current administration doesn't understand, at least from a "personal net worth" standpoint, and explains why this is happening to begin with.
The bigger problem is, when consumers have the choice between cheap crap from Aliexpress et al and (vastly) more expensive made-in-<own country>, usually only the affluent who want to show off will be able to choose the latter.
And that is a socially explosive thing in the long term... the masses, especially the rural ones, really do not like it if they feel that they can only afford subpar crap while the "rich urban librul elite" gets access to the good stuff.
That is the stuff that in the best case fuels populist movements, in the worst case revolutions.
(And on top of that, often enough "made-in-<own country>" is bordering the legally required limit on domestic production or is outright just slapping a label and repackaging the Thing)
this administration has three boxes it reaches into to sprinkle around daily
[CHAOS] [CORRUPTION] [CRUELTY]
hope everyone is enjoying the billion spent on golden statues in DC while you can't afford to put gas in your car
but don't worry, he still gets to fly around in his billion dollar QatarForceOne while taking $2 Million golf outings each weekend
The Senate, literally by design, does not represent the will of the people. Add things like gerrymandering on top and the uphill climb required of Democrats to capture the Senate keeps getting higher and higher.
how's all those cabinet members working out for you?
that's 100% Senate, regardless what you think of its representation
we can argue the details later if we somehow survive this decade
btw all the nuclear treaties like weapons in space have been allowed to expire
and he's looking at invading Cuba and Greenland if only for the chaos
without full control over Congress the next two years are going to make the first two pale in comparison
The wild part is that I'm quite academic, Waltz, Mearsheimer, Morgenthau are on my wall.
Okay let's get flagged for saying the uncomfortable silent part(chatGPT joke)...
Canada suffers more than the United States.