OPINION
You ever notice that when a store puts up a sign blaming its customers for high prices, the customers don’t write letters? They just shop somewhere else. They don’t even slam the door on the way out. That’s more or less the story of Canadian buying habits since early 2025. There’s one wrinkle, though, and it’s a big one.
The claim going around is that U.S. tariffs “aren’t working on Canadian buyers.” But a U.S. tariff is collected at the U.S. border and paid by the American importer bringing Canadian goods in. It doesn’t touch a Canadian buying an American lawnmower.
It’s like saying your neighbour’s diet isn’t working on you. What does touch that Canadian is Canada’s own counter-tariff, and the history there is less tidy than the slogan. Effective September 1, 2025, Canada fully eliminated its 25% retaliatory tariffs that had been in place since March 4, 2025, covering roughly C$30 billion in goods, while keeping counter tariffs on steel, aluminum and automobiles.
Then this summer the whole thing wound back up. On July 20, 2026, President Trump issued three proclamations imposing 50 percent tariffs under Section 338 on Canadian products, and effective September 8, 2026, Canada imposed 15, 25, and 50 per cent tariffs covering $27.6 billion in U.S. imports, focused on steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics.
So for about a year, most Canadians buying most American goods faced no tariff at all. That’s worth remembering before we credit tariffs for everything that happened in that year. Canada Removes Tariffs on U.S. Goods | Blakes +3
A lot did happen, though. Start with cars. DesRosiers Automotive Consultants reported that the share of Canadian light vehicle imports coming from the U.S. dropped to 43.7 per cent. Washington’s own complaint makes the same point from the other side: the White House pointed to a roughly 22% decline ($5.6 billion) in Canadian imports of US motor vehicles between April 2025 and March 2026.
When the government imposing the tariffs cites your shrinking purchases as a grievance, you can assume the purchases really are shrinking. Canadian Auto DealerThe Global Statistics
The broader trade numbers are softer than the headlines suggest. According to the U.S. Trade Representative, U.S. goods exports to Canada in 2025 were $333.6 billion, down 4.8 percent from 2024, while imports from Canada fell 7.2 percent. That isn’t a walkout. It’s more like a regular customer who now orders the soup instead of the steak. ustr
The most telling number has no tariff attached at all. No customs officer has ever charged duty on a weekend in Palm Springs. Even so, in January 2026, Canadian residents returned from 2.1 million trips to the United States, a 22.0% decrease from a year earlier and the 13th straight month of year-over-year decline.
Meanwhile, return trips from overseas rose past the number of return trips from the U.S. by car, for the first time since the digital Frontier Counts records began in 1972, excluding the pandemic. People are skipping the drive to Buffalo and flying to Portugal. That isn’t a spreadsheet responding to a duty rate. It’s a mood.
Statistics Canada, a place not known for editorializing, said only that travel trends among Canadian residents shifted alongside the political tensions between Canada and the United States. The Daily — Travel between Canada and other countries, January 2026 +2
The fair case for the other side deserves a real hearing. From Washington’s view, the goal was never to win over Canadian shoppers. It was leverage and the deficit, and on the deficit the scoreboard moved: the U.S. goods trade deficit with Canada was $48.3 billion in 2025, a 21 percent decrease from 2024. Canada also isn’t finding new partners as easily as the “quiet pivot” story implies.
In the first half of 2026, 56.6% of Canada’s international goods trade was still with the United States, and in Alberta, the figure was 78.2%, with pipeline and transportation infrastructure oriented toward the U.S. The administration has argued that the tariffs cover a small portion of U.S.-Canada trade and that the size of the U.S. economy will insulate it from harm. And the travel boycott may be fading.
Canadians made slightly more return trips from the U.S. in April 2026, after more than a year of declines. A skeptic could reasonably conclude that both economies absorbed a bruise, not a break. ustr.gov +4
Still, one number stands out. The share of Canada’s exports destined for the U.S. fell to 66.3% in July, the lowest since 1997 outside the pandemic. Some of that is gold and energy prices, and the analysts say so. But you don’t usually find people rearranging a thirty-year habit because of commodity prices. Bloomberg
The tariffs may not be working on Canadian buyers. They may not have needed to. The buyers seem to have worked it out on their own.
Sources:
- U.S. Trade Representative, Canada Trade Summary (2025 data);
- Statistics Canada, “Travel between Canada and other countries,” January and February 2026;
- Global News (April 2026 travel data);
- Government of Canada, Department of Finance, counter-tariff notices (Sept. 1, 2025 and Sept. 8, 2026);
- Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP; Covington & Burling LLP;
- Congressional Research Service, R49349 (Sept. 14, 2026);
- DesRosiers Automotive Consultants via Canadian Auto Dealer (May 2026);
- Visual Capitalist, compiling U.S. Census Bureau and Statistics Canada data (H1 2026);
- Bloomberg (Sept. 3, 2026); The Global Statistics (White House fact-sheet figures).