Canada Retaliates Against Nearly 700 American Products, And Somehow Peanut Butter Is In There Again
The new counter-tariffs took effect this morning, covering roughly 700 categories of American goods with the surgical precision of a country that has clearly been keeping a list.
The list is not a document. It is a personality. There is orange juice on it. There is ketchup. There are motorcycles, playing cards, cosmetics, and at least one line item so specific that trade lawyers assume it was added by someone settling a grudge from a 2019 conference in Cleveland.
Ottawa describes the measures as calibrated and proportionate. Calibrated is the word governments use when they want you to know the pain was arranged by hand. The theory of the case is that if you tax bourbon and lawn tractors in the correct congressional districts, a senator eventually picks up the phone. It has worked before, in the sense that everyone got tired at approximately the same moment and called it a deal.
Jean Chrétien, who is 92 and no longer requires anyone's approval, offered his assessment in the tone of a man who once shrugged off an intruder and went back to bed. The assessment was blunt. The assessment was also, annoyingly, correct, which is the thing about retired prime ministers. They have already survived the consequences of their own advice.
The honest problem with a trade war is arithmetic. The United States can absorb losing Canada the way a person absorbs losing a sock. Canada cannot absorb losing the United States, and everyone in the room knows it.
So we tax the mayonnaise. It is not leverage. It is a note left on the fridge, written in duty rates, addressed to a country that does not read notes.