Trump Found a New Way to Punish Canada

Here we go again. The United States will impose new 50% tariffs on a slew of imports from Canada, the White House announced on Monday afternoon. The trade levies — which will hit more than 500 categories of goods, from anoraks, beer, and curtains, to yarn, wool, and whey protein — will take effect in 30 days.

The new tariffs don’t seem to be wildfire-related. President Trump threatened to impose new tariffs last week after smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted south over the northern U.S. border, but administration officials have claimed to CNN that these new levies were already in motion by then.

Even so, a few aspects of the announcement stand out. Most important, at least from a generalist perspective, is the legal mechanism that President Trump is using to apply them: Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. This passage, which has never been used by a previous president to levy tariffs, allows the United States to tax trade from countries that the president says have “discriminated against” U.S. commerce.

Significant, too, is the fact the White House asserts this new kind of tariff could apply to any kind of product — even those that would normally be covered by the North American free trade pact, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. So far, the “Big Three” automakers — whose supply chains cross the Mexican or Canadian borders half a dozen times before a car is finally assembled — have avoided major tariff danger because auto parts and other inputs fall under the USMCA’s auspices. If the White House now thinks it can levy taxes despite that pact, then the risks for Ford, General Motors, and their suppliers have increased.

Energy and critical minerals are exempt from the new tariffs, so Canadian crude oil, gasoline, diesel, natural gas, and electricity will presumably keep flowing into the United States. (That explicit carve-out might be ominous in its own right, because energy had been protected by USMCA so far, too.) By omitting energy, Trump and his officials may be calculating they can avoid major inflationary hazards from this round of tariffs.

Who knows. In any case, to my eye, these tariffs do seem like they could aggravate construction costs and possibly contribute to wider U.S. inflation. There’s already some evidence that data centers are driving a new wave of inflation, for instance, by hiking construction input and labor costs. Yet data centers use a lot of cement — and cement will now face a 50% tariff under the new regime. So too will plywood, plaster, and paperboard, as well as industrial cooling equipment, chemicals, and some circuit boards.

I could keep listing the potential economic costs here — I could point out that overall inflation risk is rising or that average U.S. gas prices rose to $4 a gallon today on the Iran war news — but I think it’s important to look at least one step beyond the hits to commerce alone.

I mentioned earlier that these tariffs are meant to punish “discrimination.” In this case, some of the “discrimination” appears to be what some Canadian provinces did to retaliate against the president’s earlier tariffs. The state-owned liquor stores in Quebec and Ontario, for instance, stopped buying U.S.-made booze after Trump slapped 25% tariffs on Canada in March 2025; those boycotts are mentioned by name in today’s proclamation. Canada, you see, is not supposed to respond to Trump’s tariffs. It is just supposed to take it — just like it’s supposed to take the constant stream of falsehoods, abuse, belittling, and invasion threat.

Over the past few years, politicians and pundits have learned to respond to Trump’s policies by appealing to U.S. self-interest — by explaining how the president’s policies are making Americans poorer. It is a sensible strategy for a morally denuded era. A recent statement from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer about Canada, for example, criticized the president for hurting “our closest ally and partner … right when summer tourism season is arriving.” I get the move here — and I think, in some sense, Schumer is trying to avoid polarizing Trump’s treatment of Canada along partisan lines — but Canadians are more than their tourism dollars.

For the past several years, Trump has threatened to strip Canada of its sovereignty and its dignity. He has treated what was once a deep and secure relationship as something to be bartered and mined and dissipated. It is a mucilaginous approach to statecraft, and as recent reporting has made clear, its long-term costs will exceed any simple accounting. We Americans have been robbed of an honorable friendship. Some losses cannot be counted in dollars.