Canada doesn't want to be our 51st state.

[Hermskii]

Canada doesn't want to be our 51st state. I don't want Canada as our cherished 51st state either. But I do want equal tariff's which in time reduce to no tariffs. Nameless, do you or anyone here have any reason why the USA should pay more for our stuff to go to Canada than they should pay to send their stuff here? Fair question, right?

[EvilGrins]

No tariffs at all would've been ideal.

[a nameless entity]

Trumps tariffs violate the latest free trade deal that Trump himself negotiated and insisted upon. He also said at the time it's the greatest deal ever.

Tariffs only hurt business, which was why industry pushed for the free trade deal in the first place.

As regards tariffs, the one that seems to stick in American throats the most is the dairy tariffs up here. I have no idea if the USA still has independent milk farmers, or if it is all agribusiness now. But up here the tariffs we have in place are there to support and protect our still independent farmers. Who in return for little or no subsidies get paid fair prices for their product by a milk marketing board that controls all prices that the milk products companies can charge, as well as what the farmers get paid. So we pay more on average, for cheese and milk & etc than people in the USA.

Interestingly, I learned this week that the dairy tariffs don't kick in until a certain amount of product has been imported from the US. This amount was increased in the last free trade agreement.

Most interesting of all was the fact that the US didn't bother to export the full tariff free amount of products recently, anyway. So dairy tariff complaints so far are mere hyperbole at the moment.

If Trump goes ahead with auto tariffs, he's going to have ALL of the auto makers upset with him. They've built plants that specialize on certain models only in all 3 countries.
For example Toyota moved Corolla production from Ontario to Mississippi. They spent billions building a huge plant in Woodstock Ontario, that makes only the RAV 4. All the other makers have done similar things. Tariffs will cause major disruptions, and costly retooling to make it possible to build all models in the USA. That ain't gonna happen. We all know it will cost too much. Both Canada's and the USA's economies are heavily auto concentric. The huge layoffs and shutdowns will stagger both economies terribly. I suppose Mexico will suffer similarly too.

[EvilGrins]

Trumps tariffs violate the latest free trade deal that Trump himself negotiated and insisted upon. He also said at the time it's the greatest deal ever.

Yeah, I still get a bit of a laugh off that... because he's as much said whoever made that deal was a fool but he can't remember he's talking about himself.

[a nameless entity]

Canada doesn't want to be our 51st state. I don't want Canada as our cherished 51st state either. But I do want equal tariff's which in time reduce to no tariffs. Nameless, do you or anyone here have any reason why the USA should pay more for our stuff to go to Canada than they should pay to send their stuff here? Fair question, right?

Okay, I'll answer this directly now. I already discussed the dairy tariff situation. There are a few other exceptions like the dairy industry tariffs that exist, such as the leather industry tariffs. They exist for similar reasons of protecting Canadian jobs from being overwhelmed by the US.

But for the most part we have, or had, free trade. Tariffs were gone. Perhaps they'll go down in time, but that will just set us back to the pre-freetrade days.
In the 1970's I'd see adverts in American photography magazines for US based mail order houses. I wanted some stuff for my Minolta cameras. In late 1974 I did the math, taking into account the then much better exchange rate, shipping costs, and the 10% "most favoured nations" duty rate on imports of that type. By ordering enough stuff, which I did, I saved $50 over what I would have paid in Canadian stores.
That 50 bucks was nearly 10 hours worth of work on the assembly line at Ford. -Where I had spent the previous summer at just over $5 an hour, to earn money for college.

I could see things going back to those rates eventually, but free trade made camera imports FREE. I still day dream of buying a Harley trike, but tariffs on those will add thousands to the price.

Be ready to see the same thing on many automobiles soon. Trump's tariffs are going to raise prices in the USA by many thousands on many vehicles, because it will be impossible to switch to American production exclusively, for many years yet. Cars will become unaffordable for many soon!
(And that's assuming that they still have jobs, many of which will disappear as the auto industry and its spin off jobs all disappear.)