For the United States’ neighbor to the North, tariffs are fast becoming a fact of life.
It’s unlikely that they’ll go anywhere soon, even with legal snafus dragging down President Donald Trump’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) duties.
U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Jamieson Greer said as much after the president’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, telling Canadian news outlet CBC News that tariffs are a standard part of trade negotiations and symbiotic relations between nations.
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“When we go to other countries and we make a deal with them. The other countries, they agree that we can…have a protective tariff to protect our industries as we try to reshore, and they open their markets to us,” he said. “If Canada wants to agree that we can have some level of higher tariff on them while they open up their markets to us on things like dairy and other things, then that’s a helpful conversation.”
Greer underscored an oft-repeated assertion from the Trump administration: tariffs will benefit U.S. manufacturing. By making the barrier to entry higher for foreign-made goods, companies will be incentivized—or forced—to pursue domestic production, the logic goes. “We’re focused on having America first trade policy. You want the supply chains back here,” he said.
In reality, after nearly a year of tariffs, few gains have been made on that front. Data from the Institute for Supply Management showed that economic activity in the manufacturing sector ticked up in January for the first time in 12 months, though it was preceded by 26 straight months of contraction.
Susan Spence, chair of the group’s Manufacturing Business Survey Committee said that while growth across several indexes, like new orders, order backlogs and new export orders, these “positive signs” for the beginning of 2026 “are tempered by commentary citing that January is a reorder month after the holidays, and some buying appears to be to get ahead of expected price increases due to ongoing tariff issues.” Employment within the manufacturing sector is also still in contraction mode.
Whatever the motivation or justification for maintaining tariffs on Canada—which has developed complementary co-production relationships with American manufacturers across sectors like apparel and automotives—Canadian finance minister François-Philippe Champagne believes the duties, while mutable in size and shape, are likely to be a permanent fixture of the trade relationship moving forward.
“I think it is pretty well understood now in the world that the view of the American administration is that there’ll be a price to access the American market,” he told CBC News when he was asked about Greer’s remarks. “I think, you know, every country of the world that I know of is paying a price. What I’m saying is that Canada is paying the lowest price.”
Canada currently faces 10 percent duties on products that aren’t compliant with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which is due to face a review by all three North American partners in July. The country also faces 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum and 25 percent tariffs on all cars and trucks that aren’t built in the U.S.
It’s unclear, however, how Trump’s new Section 122 tariffs (currently set at 10 percent, but slated to rise to 15 percent) will affect the USMCA and Canada’s current tariff burdens.
While taking a lap of cable news shows, Greer struggled to answer questions from reporters about how the tariffs announced after the IEEPA ruling will impact existing or in-progress trade deals. He’s in “constant contact” with his counterparts in other countries, he said, and it may take several months to “rejigger the tariffs so they comply with our end of the deal.”
In the meantime, Customs and Border Protection has specified that the 10 percent ad valorem duty applies to imported articles from every country for a period of 150 days, unless specifically exempt. Among apparel and textile exporters, only products from Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras or Nicaragua that meet the rules of origin under the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) are exempt from the new tariffs.
