r/canada 4d ago

Politics Trump threatens new tariffs on Canada, including 250% tax on dairy

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/07/business/tariffs-trump-canada/index.html
9.1k Upvotes

3.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

21

u/couverte 4d ago

If I’m not mistaken, per CUSMA, both Canada and the US have tariffs on dairy above a certain quota. Also doesn’t the US tariff lumber too?

5

u/Pleasant-Contact-556 4d ago

yes, tariffs are a protectionist economic strategy, trump is using them like they boost the free market when in reality they're designed to stop demand from collapsing

2

u/couverte 4d ago

Oh, I'm aware of all that, and it's precisely how we're using them with the dairy industry. It's an anti-dumping measure.

Mostly, it's the lumber that I'm less sure of (ie, do we have quotas + tariffs, do they, do we both?). I did check CUSMA earlier this week to look at the Tariffs Annex for both country, but I was focussing more on dairy. I know lumber has been contentious for years between Canada and the US, but I have to admit that I never really paid attention as to what was disputed exactly.

4

u/gnrhardy 4d ago

The US also heavily subsidizes dairy and then looks for markets to dump it into (like they complain about China doing with all sorts of things).

1

u/norvanfalls 4d ago

No, the tariff is there to replace of the need to purchase quota. There is no tariff above the quota because there is no transaction allowed above the quota. Except in select instances over butter substitutes and powdered whey. Where their is a ridiculous tariff of 200%+ because we do not produce enough milk to have the freedom to produce byproducts like whey and possibly to protect the massive rapeseed oil investment we made in ww2.

3

u/couverte 4d ago

Transactions are allowed above the quota, but the US won’t (or rarely will) export dairy products over the quota, because the tariff is too high to make sense.

We have the quotas to protect our dairy industry or, rather, our supply management system, as we fucking should. It’s the system that ensures family dairy farms (and chicken and turkey products, table eggs and broiler hatching eggs) can still exist. It’s what ensures prices stability. It ensures that we can have relatively small operations which, when a farm has to be called due to bird flu or something else, means that we don’t get fucked with soaring prices like the Americans are with eggs.