With the rapidly approaching Sept 8 deadline coming for Canada's latest round of Tariffs during the trade war with the USA I looked at the raw data and drilled down into some of the escalation/de-escalation changes to date.
I extracted pending and past tariffs Canada has imposed on the USA from: https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/programs/international-trade-finance-policy/canadas-response-us-tariffs/complete-list-us-products-subject-to-counter-tariffs.html augmented with HS chapter details for tariff items from https://wits.worldbank.org/data/public/HSProducts.xls .
I have combined this data and uploaded a CSV file called tariffs_2026-09-08.csv to make it easy to filter/sort on items of interest and how the tariff rate has changed for an item over time.
This trade war has been going on for over a year and there's been a number of changes made during that time. A few observations:
25% tariff on USA carpet imports is to target purple state Georgia. It was imposed initially between 2025-03-04 through to 2025-08-31 at 25%, then removed, now added back effective 2026-09-08. (1)
Appliances are to target red states Tennessee, Ohio, North Carolina and purple state Pennsylvania. 25% rate since 2025-03-13 and ongoing. (2)
Fish products were initially on the Sep 8 list of items to be tariffed to target purple state Maine but were taken off and replaced with other goods due to the request of fish processors in the maritime Provinces as they would have been deeply impacted. (3)
Alcohol from the USA had a Federal Tariff of 25% between 2025-03-04 and 2025-08-31 which was then removed. Likely since 8 of the 10 Provinces blocked the import of Alcohol and Canada didn't want to risk new USA tariffs against Canadian alcohol. Alberta and Saskatchewan still allow the sale of USA alcohol though demand has dropped by 40% in Saskatchewan. (4)
The USA have now put a 50% tariff against Canadian alcohol as of 2026-08-22. Canada is not putting any federal tariffs back on alcohol in their Sep 8 response but Saskatchewan will be adding a 50% Provincial tax. (5)
Possible future de-escalation path:
The Provinces banning USA alcohol imports relax their restrictions to allow wine but not spirits to reward blue state California while still causing pain for the red states Kentucky and Tennessee. Initially BC took 'red state' liquor off the shelves but then removed all USA liquor in escalation. So if there was a de-escalation in the future possibly put blue state products back on sale. (6)
(1) Stats Can carpet imports by State
(2) Stats Can appliance imports by State
(3) https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/seafood-removed-counter-tariffs-9.7322384
(4) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/sask-american-liquor-sales-down-2026-9.7306544
(5) www.ctvnews.ca/saskatoon/article/saskatchewan-premier-announces-50-tariff-on-american-liquor/
1 Comments
SomethingWentWrong@lemmy.ca · 9 pts · 2d
Some notes about collecting this data:
The 3 date-range tabs on the Canadian Government's tariff site aren't consistent in what columns they contain. Also not consistent in HTML tags used in their tables with some using all while the other also uses .
It would be good to have more details on what the various Provinces have done and when. Ie. Ontario rejected USA companies from bidding on new provincial contracts.
Stats Can uses NACIS for industries to track imports from Country/US state. Tariffs use HS codes for products. Head hurts.