American President Donald Trump signed a decree on Monday July 20 imposing 50% additional customs duties on several Canadian products “in response to Canada’s discriminatory treatment of American products”, pointing to trade conflicts on dairy products, alcohol and automobiles.
These new customs duties, which are due to come into force in a month, will apply to products as varied as wine, hockey sticks and even cement. Products entering the United States under the North American Free Trade Agreement (CUSMA) will also be affected.
Several sectors considered essential, such as energy, fishing products or critical minerals, are however explicitly excluded from this new surcharge. “This is the latest in a series of unilateral trade actions initiated by the United States,” responded Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in a statement Monday evening, denouncing a “direct violation” of CUSMA.
In response, “Canada, as it has the right to do, has taken equivalent measures,” he announced, without detailing these measures. He added that his country had already made proposals to resolve this trade dispute and was “ready to intensify these discussions.”
A sign of the recurring tensions between the two North American neighbors, Donald Trump threatened on Friday to impose new customs duties on Canadian products because of the forest fires whose smoke has seriously degraded the air quality in the northeast of the United States.
In announcing these new customs duties, the White House affirmed that Canada was one of only two countries besides China to have responded to American efforts to “rebalance (their) trade balance”. She also denounced the boycott, put in place by most Canadian provinces, against American alcohol in reaction to threats from Donald Trump and his repeated calls to make Canada the American “51st state”.
“Canada has removed American alcoholic products from its shelves, granted better access to European dairy products and added a cap on American vehicles exported to Canada by companies that have relocated,” detailed the White House Trade Representative (USTR), Jamieson Greer, in a press release, judging that the decree made it possible “to hold Canada accountable”.
Brazil already targeted
Donald Trump imposed a first series of 25% customs duties against Canada upon his return to the White House in 2025. The American president then accused the northern neighbor, like Mexico, of not fighting effectively against fentanyl trafficking and migration routes to the United States. However, he clarified that these surcharges did not apply to products circulating within the framework of CUSMA, which represents more than 80% of Canadian exports to the United States, according to data from Ottawa.
These customs duties were, however, canceled at the end of February by the American Supreme Court, at the same time as all the non-sectoral customs duties imposed by the White House, the highest American court considering that the American president had exceeded his prerogatives.
Donald Trump has since sought to reimpose all of the canceled surcharges, having temporarily implemented 10% customs duties. These, however, expire on Friday, and the White House could announce a new series of customs duties, while commercial investigations into the practices of around sixty countries, among the main trading partners of the United States, have been launched in order to justify new surcharges.
Brazil thus became the first target of these new customs duties on Thursday, with a 25% surcharge imposed on a certain number of products exported to the United States and which will come into force on Wednesday.
