Canada slapped 25 percent tariffs on about 1,800 American products in March, and will implement 4,400 more on April 2, the day President Donald Trump plans to announce higher tariffs against every country that taxes U.S. imports.
Many of Canada’s tariffs are bizarrely targeted at imports that are virtually nonexistent, leading critics to suspect the list has been padded with nonsense to make the Canadian response look much tougher than it really is.
CTV on Sunday listed some of the “odd and obscure” imports targeted by Canada, including “flamethrowers, false beards, church bell cases, and live monkeys,” plus “manatee meat and passenger drones.”
Canadians will soon find themselves paying more for imported American accordion parts, emus, bovine semen, and clothing made with asbestos fibers. Toronto residents who dreamed of reaching the stars with an American-made spaceship will pay 25 percent more to make their dreams come true. Ottawa diarists will have to pay 25 percent more if they want to record their daily adventures in a diary imported from the United States.
“Why would you list such a plethora of small, obscure products? I think it’s being driven by the need to produce visible optics, and so they can say, ‘Look, we’ve got 6,200 (items), we’re really going at this, we’re really sticking it to Donald Trump and the Americans,” said professor Ian Lee of the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University.
“These are not consumer goods that are turning over in high volumes. They’re low-volume purchases, which tells me they’re going to have a small impact on Canadians if only a small number are buying them on any given day,” he said.
“I will say, manatee meat isn’t something we can make ourselves, but I don’t think it will create too much of a backlash from Canadian consumers,” University of Regina economics professor Jason Childs wryly noted.
Childs may be underselling the pain that will soon be faced by Canadian gourmands, as not only imported manatee meat will be socked with higher tariffs but also American-grown camel and primate meat. Canada’s fledgling camel-burger industry will tremble on the verge of extinction.
Of course, not everything getting hit with retaliatory tariffs is a bizarre niche product, and Canada is employing other strategies to fight the trade war.
CBC reported on Sunday that the Canadian government is purchasing billboards in Republican-voting states, and the District of Columbia, with messages such as, “Tariffs Are a Tax On Your Grocery Bill,” “Tariffs Are a Tax At the Gas Pump,” and “Tariffs Are a Tax On Hard-Working Americans.”
A digital bill board flashes a tariffs message in Kennedy Township, Pa., Tuesday, March 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
An alert correspondent in Columbus, Georgia, noticed that the Canadians made the small mistake of printing half of their billboard messages in French, a language not widely spoken in most U.S. cities. Other critics found the billboard messages amusingly overwrought, since American consumers are not nearly as dependent upon imports from the north as the Canadian government is hoping.
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