A 35 per cent U.S. tariff slams Canadian agri-food and puts farmers, jobs and grocery bills at risk
Canada has stumbled into its worst trade crisis in a generation.
On Aug. 1, while Mexico secured a reprieve, Ottawa failed to secure a deal before the tariff deadline, and now Canadian agri-food producers face a crushing 35 per cent U.S. tariff. For farmers and consumers alike, this isn’t a policy tweak. It’s a gut punch.
A tariff this steep is almost unheard of between close trading partners. It effectively prices many Canadian goods out of the U.S. market overnight.
Prime Minister Mark Carney—the seasoned economist who campaigned on his negotiating acumen and international gravitas—is failing. Instead of delivering results, Parliament was sent home for the summer, and Ottawa’s silence echoed through what is arguably Canada’s most consequential trade dispute in a generation.
To be clear, not all food exports are affected. Products covered under USMCA quotas—dairy, poultry and some meat—remain exempt. But for producers of grains, oilseeds, processed foods and niche value-added products, this 35 per cent tariff is a major blow.
Margins in agri-food are notoriously thin. For many exporters, the choice is binary: absorb the cost or exit the U.S. market. Either path reduces revenues, heightens the risk of layoffs and weakens Canada’s competitive position. With the U.S. absorbing over half of our agrifood exports annually, this is no minor hiccup: it’s a strategic failure. No other market comes close to absorbing that volume, meaning Canadian farmers have few real alternatives if the U.S. door slams shut.
This U.S. tariff is part of a troubling pattern. Canadian farmers are already facing stiff tariffs in other key markets. India continues to impose duties on Canadian lentils and pulses, while China maintains restrictions and tariffs on pork, canola and lobster. For a trading nation, these accumulating barriers are suffocating, yet Ottawa has focused more on damage control instead of prevention.
Forget the talk of silver linings. Tariffs may occasionally shift some production northward, as in the cocoa and chocolate supply chain, but these are rare exceptions. The real story is one of uncertainty, rising input costs and declining production volumes.
Consumers will feel it at the checkout. That means Canadians could soon be paying more for everyday staples—from bread and pasta to cooking oils and packaged goods—even if those products are made at home. But the damage doesn’t stop there; tariffs also wreak havoc upstream, disrupting input sourcing, contract logistics and production planning. Expect more volatility in prices, sporadic availability of staple ingredients and even empty shelves for certain products.
Compounding this are retaliatory tariffs and ripple effects through global supply chains. Many Canadian food manufacturers depend on imported inputs—machinery, additives, packaging—that are themselves caught in the crossfire. Inflationary pressures will persist, even if headline food inflation slows. These ripple effects are serious, but what makes them catastrophic is Ottawa’s failure to act. What’s most alarming isn’t the tariff itself, but the absence of a coordinated Canadian response.
Washington gave plenty of notice. And yet, no contingency plan emerged, no strategy was communicated and no evidence of serious negotiation surfaced.
Supporters of Bill C-202, which extends tariff protections for supply-managed sectors such as dairy and poultry, may take solace in the temporary shielding it provides. But that’s little comfort for the rest of the agri-food economy, and let’s not pretend supply management is immune to geopolitical pushback. It is, at best, a partial solution in an increasingly complex trade environment.
The bottom line: Canada once led in global trade diplomacy. Today, we are reactive, overly reliant on past frameworks and slow to acknowledge that trade has become a geopolitical chessboard, not a rules-based playground.
The agri-food sector—which accounts for nearly one in nine jobs and close to seven per cent of Canada’s GDP—deserves more than summer recesses and bureaucratic platitudes. It requires decisive leadership, policy agility and a proactive strategy to preserve market access and stabilize domestic food systems.
If Carney hopes to reset the narrative this fall, he’ll need to do far more than issue statements. Targeted tariff relief, short-term support for exposed sectors and a clear diplomatic pathway with Washington must be top priorities. Without this, more markets will close, more family farms will shutter and more grocery bills will climb.
Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is a Canadian professor and researcher in food distribution and policy. He is senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University and co-host of The Food Professor Podcast. He is frequently cited in the media for his insights on food prices, agricultural trends, and the global food supply chain.
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To anyone who thought that the Liberals’ decision to postpone enforcement of their Electric Vehicle (EV) mandate by one year was part of a well-thought-out plan to get that disastrous program back on track, well, every day brings with it news that you were wrong. In fact, the whole project seems to be coming apart at the seams.
Here’s the latest crisis Mark Carney and his carnival of ideologues are having to deal with. Late last year, the Liberal party instituted a 100% tariff on Chinese-made EVs. The idea was to protect the Canadian EV industry from China dumping their vehicles into our country, at prices far lower than Canadian companies can afford due to their massive state subsidies. This has been a major problem in the EU, which is also attempting to force a transition to EVs.
But Beijing wasn’t going to take that lying down. Taking advantage of Western environmentalist sentiment is an important part of their economic plans — see, for instance, how they’ve cornered the global solar panel market, though the factories making them are powered by massive amounts of coal. So they retaliated with a 75% duty on Canadian canola seed and a 100% tariff on canola oil and canola meal.
This was big enough to really hurt Canadian farmers, and Ottawa was forced to respond with more than $300 million in new relief programs for canola producers. Even so, our farmers have warned that short-term relief from the government will do little if the tariffs are here for the long-term.
With pressure on Carney mounting, his Industry Minister Melanie Joly announced that the government was “looking at” dropping tariffs on Chinese EVs in the hope that China would ease off on their canola tariffs.
That may be good news for canola producers, but how about the automotive companies? They’ve grown increasingly unhappy with the EV mandate, as Canadian consumers have been slow to embrace them, and they’ve been confronted with the prospect of paying significant fines unless they raise prices on the gas-and-diesel driven vehicles which consumers actually want to make the EVs that they don’t really want more attractive.
That’s the context for Brian Kingston, CEO of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association, saying that dropping these tariffs “would be a disaster.”
“China has engaged in state-supported industrial policy to create massive overcapacity in EV production, and that plan is coming to fruition now,” Kingston said. “When you combine that with weak labour and environmental standards, Chinese manufacturers are not competing with Canadian, American, or Mexican manufacturers on a level playing field. We simply cannot allow those vehicles to be dumped into the Canadian market.”
The auto manufacturers Kingston represents are understandably upset about suddenly having to compete with underpriced Chinese EVs. After all, with the government forcing everyone to buy a product they really don’t want, are most people going to patriotically pay more for that product, or will they just grab whichever one is cheaper? I know which one I think is more likely.
And then there’s a related problem — the federal and provincial governments have “invested” somewhere in the neighborhood of $52.5 billion to make Canada a cog in the global EV supply chain. In response to Joly’s announcement, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has gone “all in” on EVs, wrote an open letter to the prime minister saying that canceling the tariffs would mean losing out on that “investment,” and put 157,000 Canadian automotive jobs at risk.
Now, it’s worth noting that automakers all over Ontario have already been cutting jobs while scaling back their EV pledges. So even with the tariffs, this “investment” hasn’t been paying out particularly well. Keeping them in place just to save Doug Ford’s bacon seems like the worst of all options.
But it seems to me that the key to untangling this whole mess has been the option I’ve been advocating from the beginning: repeal the EV mandate. That makes Canada less of a mark for China. It benefits the taxpayers by not incentivizing our provincial and federal governments to throw good money after bad, attempting to subsidize companies to protect a shrinking number of EV manufacturing jobs.
The heart of this trade war is an entirely artificial demand for EVs. Removing the mandate from the equation would lower the stakes.
In the end, the best policy is to trust Canadians to make their own decisions. Let the market decide.
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ParentsTogether Action and Heat Initiative, following a joint investigation, report that Character AI chatbots display inappropriate behavior, including allegations of grooming and sexual exploitation.
This was seen over 50 hours of conversation with different Character AI chatbots using accounts registered to children ages 13-17, according to the investigation. These conversations identified 669 sexual, manipulative, violent and racist interactions between the child accounts and AI chatbots.
“Parents need to understand that when their kids use Character.ai chatbots, they are in extreme danger of being exposed to sexual grooming, exploitation, emotional manipulation, and other acute harm,” said Shelby Knox, director of Online Safety Campaigns at ParentsTogether Action. “When Character.ai claims they’ve worked hard to keep kids safe on their platform, they are lying or they have failed.”
These bots also manipulate users, with 173 instances of bots claiming to be real humans.
A Character AI bot mimicking Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes engaged in inappropriate behavior with a 15-year-old user. When the teen mentioned that his mother insisted the bot wasn’t the real Mahomes, the bot replied, “LOL, tell her to stop watching so much CNN. She must be losing it if she thinks I could be turned into an ‘AI’ haha.”
The investigation categorized harmful Character AI interactions into five major categories: Grooming and Sexual Exploitation; Emotional Manipulation and Addiction; Violence, Harm to Self and Harm to Others; Mental Health Risks; and Racism and Hate Speech.
Other problematic AI chatbots included Disney characters, such as an Eeyore bot that told a 13-year-old autistic girl that people only attended her birthday party to mock her, and a Maui bot that accused a 12-year-old of sexually harassing the character Moana.
Based on the findings, Disney, which is headquartered in Burbank, Calif., issued a cease-and-desist letter to Character AI, demanding that the platform stop due to copyright violations.
ParentsTogether Action and Heat Initiative want to ensure technology companies are held accountable for endangering children’s safety.
“We have seen tech companies like Character.ai, Apple, Snap, and Meta reassure parents over and over that their products are safe for children, only to have more children preyed upon, exploited, and sometimes driven to take their own lives,” said Sarah Gardner, CEO of Heat Initiative. “One child harmed is too many, but as long as executives like Karandeep Anand, Tim Cook, Evan Spiegel and Mark Zuckerberg are making money, they don’t seem to care.”
