Canada’s Trade Numbers Just DESTROYED Trump’s Narrative — And the Data Is Brutal

Ajouté : 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]When Donald Trump imposed 25% tariffs on Canadian goods in February 2025, he made a very specific bet. He bet that Canada would break. His advisers talked openly about collapsing the Canadian economy to make annexation easier. His economic team projected that Canada, so deeply tied to American markets, would have no real option but to capitulate.

[00:00:27]14 months later, the numbers are in and they tell a story that nobody in Washington wants to headline. Canada did not collapse. Canada did not capitulate.

[00:00:39]And the American consumers and businesses that were never supposed to pay for any of this are now, according to the Federal Reserve's own researchers, absorbing nearly 90% of the tariff costs themselves. Over the next several minutes, you are going to see exactly what happened, what the data actually shows, and why the strategic assumptions behind this trade war were wrong in ways that are only now fully coming into focus. Here is where we start. When Trump signed those executive orders on February 1st, 2025, the projections from major economic institutions were severe. Oxford Economics ran the numbers and concluded that blanket 25% tariffs would push Canada's GDP down 2.5% peakto trough by early 2026.

[00:01:30]They projected inflation surging to 7.2% by mid 2025 and 150,000 layoffs lifting Canada's unemployment rate to 7.9% by year end.

[00:01:43]CIBC warned the hit to Canada's GDP could reach 5% under prolonged tariffs at that level. A shock they compared in magnitude to the 2008 to 2009 financial crisis. None of that happened. Canada's GDP expanded roughly 1.7% in 2025.

[00:02:04]The unemployment rate was 6.5% by November of that year.

[00:02:09]Canada finished 2025 with the second highest GDP growth in the entire G7. Not second from the bottom, second from the top. Canada's own federal government in its spring 2026 economic update confirmed what the Bank of Canada had been tracking for months. While activity softened across the year, a recession was avoided and growth is expected to pick up further in 2026.

[00:02:35]The country that was supposed to be economically broken by the end of 2025 is still standing, still growing, and now restructuring its entire trade architecture to make sure it never needs to depend on one neighbor again. That last part is the part that really matters and we will get to it. But first, you need to understand the one number that dismantles the entire White House narrative about who was winning this trade war. When the Trump administration imposed those tariffs, the official message was clear and consistent. Foreign producers would eat the cost. America's leverage was too large. Canada, China, and everyone else would absorb the pain to keep access to the American market. The tariffs would generate revenue for the US Treasury, punish trade partners, and cost American consumers almost nothing. A February 2026 analysis from New York Federal Reserve researchers found that American consumers and companies were absorbing nearly 90% of tariff costs. Not foreign producers, Americans. The Tax Foundation calculated that Trump's tariff regime amounted to a tax increase of roughly $1,000 per American household in 2025.

[00:03:52]Goldman Sachs tracked the numbers in real time and found that US consumers were absorbing 55% of tariff costs by the end of 2025 with that share expected to climb to 70% through 2026 as pre-tariff inventory ran out and businesses passed costs forward. The total tariff bill to American households and businesses was estimated at $1.2 trillion. Consumers alone were projected to absorb $592 billion in higher prices.

[00:04:25]Morning Stars economists put it plainly.

[00:04:28]US businesses had been footing almost all of the tariff bills throughout 2025 because they were drawing down pre-tariff inventory stockpiles to avoid raising prices. That buffer is now gone.

[00:04:42]And their forecast for 2026 shows durables prices rising a cumulative 4.5% and non-durables rising 5.6% as those costs move through the supply chain to American families.

[00:04:58]This is not a minor accounting discrepancy. The foundational premise of the tariff strategy that foreign partners pay turned out to be structurally false. And nowhere is that clearer than in what happened with Canada specifically.

[00:05:13]Canada imported $350 billion worth of Americanmade goods in 2024.

[00:05:20]It was the single largest export market for the United States. When Trump moved on Canada, Canada moved back, not just with counter tariffs, but with something that has been harder to quantify and impossible to stop. a genuine sustained grassroots economic pivot away from American products. The byanadian movement started almost immediately after the February 2025 tariffs took effect. It started with provincial governments pulling American alcohol from liquor store shelves. Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, and others removed US wine and spirits from government stores. But what followed went far beyond government policy. An Angus Reed Institute poll of 3,310 Canadians found that 85% said they were planning to replace or had already replaced American products with Canadian or non-American alternatives. Apps were built overnight. Maple Scan by Canadian OC Canada, giving consumers the ability to identify the origin of every product at the shelf. The knock-on effects for American companies were immediate and concrete. The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States reported that exports of American spirits fell 9% in the second quarter of 2025 compared to the same period the previous year. A California diaper company called Parasol Company had been working with Canadian distributors for months to break into the Canadian market only to have the deal pulled entirely due to, in the CEO's own words, growing anti-American sentiment.

[00:07:01]The CEO of Brown Foreman, the company behind Jack Daniels, told investors that being pulled from Canadian shelves was worse than a tariff.

[00:07:10]A Pennsylvania fragrance company scrapped its entire Canada expansion plan mid-process.

[00:07:17]An Irving personal care executive in Canada reported that weekly shipments of their domestic diapers had quadrupled.

[00:07:24]The Bank of Canada tracked grocery spending patterns across the country and found that by March 2025, the proportion of food spending on Canadian products had shifted upward by approximately 2 percentage points relative to January 2025.

[00:07:40]While spending on American products fell by a comparable amount, that shift was not short-lived. It persisted through the summer and the bank's own consumer surveys published in February 2026 showed Canadians maintaining a strong preference to continue buying Canadian.

[00:07:59]On crossber travel, the number Canadians took 10 million fewer trips to the United States in 2025 compared to 2024, a drop of 25%.

[00:08:11]It represented the largest year-over-year decline in crossber visits outside of the CO 19 pandemic when the border was legally closed. The estimated economic loss to the United States from Canadian tourism alone reached approximately 3 billion Canadian dollars. Those Canadians didn't stop traveling, they redirected. Statistics Canada reported a 4% increase in domestic travel and roughly 10% more Canadians spending money inside Canada compared to the year prior. Now hold all of that against what the White House was claiming about leverage. The premise was that Canada needed the United States more than the United States needed Canada. That Canada had no viable alternatives. that the weight of American market access would force Ottawa to the table on US terms.

[00:09:04]That framing required Canada to behave as a passive actor, a smaller country that would absorb the shock and wait for relief. Canada did not behave that way.

[00:09:15]And the numbers now show why. Prime Minister Mark Carney arrived in office as the trade war was already in full escalation.

[00:09:24]A former central banker who had run both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, Carney treated the trade shock as a structural problem requiring a structural response, not a diplomatic crisis to be managed with concessions.

[00:09:38]His government committed in the 2025 federal budget to doubling exports to non-American markets over the next decade, targeting $600 billion in non US exports by 2035 in current dollar terms.

[00:09:54]$5 billion was allocated specifically for trade infrastructure to move Canadian products to global markets.

[00:10:01]Export Development Canada was tasked with increasing the total business it facilitates by $25 billion by 2030.

[00:10:10]Carney spent the first year of his government outside Canada for 68 days, roughly 20% of his time in office, traveling to 26 countries pursuing deals. Not all of those trips produced immediate results. A hub analysis in March 2026 described some announcements as thin, but several were not thin at all. In June 2025, Canada and the European Union announced what they called the new EU Canada strategic partnership of the future, accompanied by a security and defense partnership covering trade, technology, energy, and security cooperation. In February 2026, Canada became the first non-European country admitted to the EU's Security Action for Europe initiative, unlocking access to European defense procurement markets. By May 2026, Corin was telling a global summit in Toronto that Canada's goal was to move from reliance to resilience and that reimagining North American integration was now a national priority.

[00:11:19]Canada also moved on China in a way that would have been politically unthinkable two years earlier. Carney traveled to Beijing and announced what Ottawa framed as a new era in Canada China relations, a trade agreement aimed at boosting Canadian exports to China by 50% under a new energy and strategic partnership.

[00:11:41]The UAE committed to investing $70 billion in Canada. A $1 billion project for critical minerals expansion was announced. Canada's pension funds, collectively managing $2 trillion in assets, were set up to visit the UAE in 2026 to identify investment opportunities. On the export diversification front, the data shows early movement. A trade analysis published in early 2026 found that Canadian exports to the UK, EU, and China had surged 91%, 18% and 18% respectively in 2025.

[00:12:21]The Sitta Free Trade Agreement with the European Union was playing its designed role, eliminating tariffs on 99% of products covering 98% of Canada's then current exports to EU markets.

[00:12:36]The comprehensive and progressive agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Canada helped negotiate, covers a partner GDP of 39.8 trillion and had seen trade growth of 282% since 1993.

[00:12:53]That context is critical. Canada is not starting from scratch on diversification.

[00:12:59]It already had the legal architecture in place. What the trade war did was force Canadian businesses and the Canadian government to actually use it at speed and scale. RBC Economics published a one-year retrospective in April 2026 that identified the structural shape of the adjustment.

[00:13:19]Steel exports to the United States fell 25%.

[00:13:23]Aluminum exports fell 6%.

[00:13:26]Automotive sector exports fell 5%. Those are real painful numbers concentrated specifically in Ontario and Quebec where those industries are clustered. The Bank of Canada projected that by the end of 2026, Canadian GDP would be roughly 1.5% lower than it would have been without tariffs. That is a genuine cost. No one in Ottawa is pretending otherwise. But here is what matters for the overall picture. Canada absorbed those sectoral hits, restructured around them, diversified around them, and still produced positive GDP growth for the year. The economy created 180,000 jobs in the final 3 months of 2025.

[00:14:12]The OECD projected Canadian GDP growth strengthening to 1.3% in 2026 and 1.7% in 2027. Canada's average tariff rate with the United States after the Supreme Court of the United States struck down the EPA based tariffs in February 2026 in a ruling Trump himself called potentially devastating dropped to 5.2%.

[00:14:39]That is the lowest average tariff rate among all major US trading partners.

[00:14:44]That Supreme Court ruling deserves its own paragraph. In February 2026, the US Supreme Court struck down a significant portion of the tariffs Trump had imposed using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the emergency authority he had used to justify the broadest tariffs. Trump scrambled to impose a replacement global 10% tariff under a different legal mechanism for Canada. KUSMA compliant goods remained largely exempt. The legal architecture of the Canada, United States, Mexico agreement, which Trump had signed in his first term as a replacement for NAFTA ended up functioning as a partial shield for Canadian exporters, even as Trump was using every available tool to weaponize trade against Ottawa. That irony has not been lost on Canadian trade analysts. The deal Trump had championed as a signature achievement of his first administration became one of the key mechanisms that limited the damage his second administration tried to inflict.

[00:15:48]Now step back and look at what the full picture actually shows. Trump told the world that Canada's economy was parasitic, that the trade relationship was unfair, that tariffs would punish Canada into submission and generate revenue for American workers. One year in, here is the actual ledger. Canada avoided recession. Canada grew faster than almost every G7 country in 2025.

[00:16:16]Canada diversified its trade relationships at a speed no one predicted was achievable. The byanadian movement permanently shifted consumer behavior in ways that will not be reversed by a diplomatic phone call.

[00:16:29]American consumers are absorbing roughly $700 per household in tariff costs in 2026 alone, down from $1,000 in 2025, with Goldman Sachs projecting those passrough costs continuing to rise.

[00:16:45]American businesses are planning broader price hikes in 2026 as pre-tariff inventory runs dry. US inflation has been running higher than it would have without tariffs, and the Federal Reserve has been forced to hold rates higher for longer as a direct result. Canada did not come out of this unscathed.

[00:17:05]No honest analyst is saying that Ontario and Quebec manufacturers absorbed real job losses in specific sectors. Business investment was delayed. GDP growth was slower than it would have been. The Bank of Canada had to cut rates and hold them there. The structural adjustment of redirecting 75% of exports away from a single market toward half a dozen others is not something that happens cleanly or quickly. But that was the stated theory behind the tariffs. That Canada, uniquely dependent on American market access, could not survive the removal of that access. That theory has been tested by the data over 14 months and the data has returned a verdict.

[00:17:51]Canada's second highest G7 growth in 2025 is not what an economic collapse looks like. 10 million fewer Canadians traveling to the United States is not what a capitulation looks like. A 91% surge in exports to the UK and EU is not what a country with no alternatives looks like. A government committing $5 billion in trade infrastructure. A prime minister spending 68 days building new relationships in 26 countries, $70 billion in UAE investment commitments, a new EU strategic partnership, a reset with Beijing, and a domestic consumer movement that has permanently altered what brands sit on Canadian grocery shelves. That is not what surrender looks like. And the United States is now running the numbers on the cost of all of this, too. American spirits down 9% in Canada. American expansion plans canled. 3 billion in lost Canadian tourist spending. Import prices up nearly 10% while core consumer goods prices rise. Small and medium businesses watching their effective tariff payment rates double from 6.5% to 11.4%. 4% within 7 months of the tariffs taking effect. The gap between the premise of this trade war and the documented outcome of it is not a rounding error. It is the story itself.

[00:19:26]The country that was supposed to collapse restructured instead. The consumers who were supposed to be protected from the costs are paying them. And the market dependency that was supposed to be Canada's fatal vulnerability turned out to be the thing that finally forced Canada to build the trade network it should have built decades ago. That is the story the numbers tell, not the story either government wants to lead with, but the one the data has been quietly writing for 14 months. Thanks a lot for watching. I genuinely appreciate your support. If this kind of analysis is useful to you, drop a like and subscribe so more people get access to it and join the conversation in the comments below.

[00:20:09]I want to know what you think Canada should do