Washington
CNN
—
President Donald Trump added Tuesday to his rapidly growing list of false claims about Canada, wrongly asserting on social media that Canada is “ONE OF THE HIGHEST TARIFFING NATIONS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD.”
Canada is a low-tariff country compared to most others. In fact, figures published by the World Bank show Canada had a lower average tariff rate (1.37%) than the US (1.49%) in 2022, the most recent year for which the data is available, weighted for how much of various products each country imported. Of 137 countries for which the World Bank published these trade-weighted 2022 tariff averages, Canada was 102nd from the top.
Bermuda topped the list at 29.52%. Seventeen additional countries, a dozen of them in Africa, were above 12%. To cite an assortment of other countries with tariffs higher than Canada: India was at 11.46%; South Korea was at 8.63%; Brazil was at 7.44%; Mexico was at 4.75%; China was at 3.09%; the United Kingdom was at 3.07%; and Japan was at 1.64%.
There are various ways to assess a country’s overall tariff picture, but Canada is also nowhere near the top when you use other standard calculation methods. Canada also had a lower 2022 tariff rate (1.83%) than the US (2.72%) in a simple-average comparison that doesn’t factor in trade volumes, the World Bank data show.
Trump’s claim about Canada is “nonsense,” said Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics and trade at the libertarian Cato Institute think tank, who discussed the World Bank figures in a February article.
Canada did this month impose new tariffs on imports from the US in response to Trump’s own new tariffs on imports from Canada. Two days after Trump’s tariffs took effect, he suspended them, until April 2, on Canadian imports covered by his US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
Canada’s dairy tariffs are an exception, not the norm — and not actually hitting any US products
As he has before, Trump pointed in the Tuesday social media post to one set of notably high Canadian tariffs — dairy duties exceeding 250% on some products — as a prime example of Canada’s supposedly unfair trade practices. But he again failed to mention that these Canadian dairy tariffs only kick in after the US has hit a certain, Trump-negotiated quantity of zero-tariff sales to Canada. The US is not currently filling its zero-tariff sales quota in any category of dairy product, so the tariffs aren’t being applied.
Trump also did not acknowledge that Canada’s “supply management” protectionism over its dairy and poultry industries is the exception, not the norm. “The overwhelming proportion” of US trade with Canada has for decades been tariff-free for both countries, noted Dartmouth College economics professor Douglas Irwin; “Canada does not apply tariffs on most US goods.” The US Department of Agriculture itself points out that “almost all” US agricultural exports to Canada faced zero tariffs or quotas under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that took effect in 1994 and continue to face zero tariffs or quotas under the USMCA that modified NAFTA in 2020.
Daniel Schwanen, senior vice president at the C.D. Howe Institute think tank in Canada, said Trump’s claim about Canada being a high-tariff country has “a grain or an element of truth” given Canada’s hefty dairy and poultry tariffs on imports above the tariff-free quota thresholds — but Schwanen said Trump’s claim is still “wrong as a general statement.”
“It would be really unfortunate if people got the impression that Canada is in general a high-tariff country, especially vis-à-vis American products. That’s not the case. It is the case with respect to, really, a sliver of trade,” Schwanen said in a Tuesday interview.
Trump made the false claim in a social media post in which he said he was doubling, to 50%, his tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum in response to the Canadian province of Ontario announcing a 25% surcharge on electricity exports to three US states (which Ontario’s premier said later Tuesday he was suspending, prompting Trump to abandon his own retaliation plan).
Trump also threatened in the post to impose car tariffs “which will, essentially, permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada” if Canada doesn’t remove “egregious, long time Tariffs.” And he repeated his call for Canada to become the 51st US state, a notion overwhelmingly rejected by Canadians.
