Trump Orders Federal Agencies To Find And Remove Canadian Products, Discovers This Includes The Paper
A presidential memorandum signed this week directs federal agencies to identify and purge Canadian products from government procurement, a task that sounds simple until someone opens a supply closet in the Department of Agriculture.
The early inventory is not encouraging. Roughly two-thirds of the newsprint and a great deal of the softwood framing in federal buildings arrived from north of the border. So did the potash behind the fertilizer, the aluminum in the folding chairs, and a non-trivial share of the electricity that keeps the lights on in upstate New York field offices. One procurement officer in Kansas City reportedly asked whether maple syrup in the cafeteria counts, and was told to flag it and await guidance.
The memorandum's stated logic is that America should not fund a trading partner that behaves badly. The unstated logic is that nobody in the room knew what percentage of an F-35 landing gear assembly is machined in Ontario.
Canadian officials responded with the diplomatic equivalent of a shrug and a quiet note to the Commerce Department reminding them that the alternative suppliers are, in most categories, more expensive and further away. Ottawa has learned that the most effective retaliation is a spreadsheet.
The deeper problem is definitional. A product assembled in Michigan from parts made in Windsor, trucked over a bridge that opened in June, is legally American and functionally binational. Purging it requires deciding where a thing is from, which is a philosophy question, not a procurement one.
The memorandum gives agencies 90 days to report back. Several are expected to report that they looked very hard and found nothing.