By In the US, we have a tendency to stamp products as “American-made” and imagine that that product was entirely made within our borders. The truth is that we should be referring to almost everything that we build as “North American-made.” Cars, appliances, machine tools, tractors, toilet paper… the list goes on and on. If we trace their supply chains far enough, what we find is that they almost always run through Canada (and often, Mexico) before arriving at the US plant that gets to put its name on the box. That cross-border web is exactly what lets US manufacturing compete against the rest of the world.
Over the past few weeks, President Trump and other White House officials have looked at that arrangement and said, “we don’t need Canada, they need us.” President Trump called Canada “among the worst nations in the world to deal with” and said that it has been “ripping off the United States of America for years.” In response to these accusations, he threatened a 50 percent tariff on Canadian cars, trucks, auto parts, and steel shipments starting in January.
But this would not be a tax on Canada. It would be a tax on the American assembly line that needs those parts to build cars, trucks, and machinery. When inputs are made more expensive, final goods become more expensive, too.
Consider how a car, for example, is built. Right now, a truck hauling a load of stamped metal from Ontario is heading toward a manufacturing plant in Michigan. Once delivered, it will be welded into a subassembly, trucked back across the river to have more work done, and returned to Michigan to be bolted into an “American-made” car. The same part can cross international borders six or more times before it finally becomes a finished Ford, Jeep, or Chevy. Detroit’s Big Three automakers did not look across the Ambassador Bridge to establish some of their operations there by mistake. They did so because it made them more productive and more competitive against the likes of Toyota, Hyundai, and BYD. But if we put a 50 percent wall in the middle of that supply chain, the parts that US workers need to do their jobs suddenly become more expensive. The tax that was supposed to target Canada instead hits the very people it was supposed to help.
The most telling part of all of this comes from Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers. Mr. Fain is no free trader and has come out extraordinarily vocal in support of the president’s trade agenda, including tearing up the USMCA and rewriting it from the ground up. On August 25, just days after talks between the US and Canada broke down, he released a statement reading, in part: “The UAW rejects any escalation on Canada, a country with strong unions and labor standards.”
To commemorate the one-hundredth day of his second term, President Trump held a rally in Michigan promising to bring jobs back to the automotive sector and Detroit “at levels you’ve never seen before.” When the leader of the union you claim to be helping comes out against your policy, odds are good that you’ve picked the wrong target.
Trade, in the president’s view, is described as if it were purely transactional and reducible to net flows of dollar figures. But trade is about so much more than that; it’s about trust and relationships built over decades. These relationships matter not just because Canada supplies us with steel, parts, lumber, energy, and other intermediate goods that US firms use every day, but because Canada has proven itself to be a friend and ally when friendship mattered most. This month marks a particularly important anniversary of exactly that.
On September 11, 2001, when the US shut its airspace in response to a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, hundreds of planes full of Americans had few places to safely land. And on that day, Canada opened its doors without a moment’s pause. Gander International Airport in Newfoundland, Canada, remains the most famous example. Thirty-eight airplanes carrying a total of almost 7,000 passengers were redirected to an airport with two runways and 13 gates, almost doubling the local population of just over nine thousand people. An airport that usually sees four or five flights per day was suddenly asked to land thirty-eight planes in a span of about 90 minutes.
The town responded with hospitality. Gander had only about 500 hotel rooms, so residents opened their homes. They provided space, food, transportation, and comfort to thousands of complete strangers. Bus drivers in town, who happened to be on strike that day, dropped their picket signs and volunteered their time driving people for the next five days.
Across the rest of Canada, the story is the same. Tens of thousands of stranded travelers were housed and fed. Phone lines and cars were loaned; laundry was washed for days until American skies were deemed safe to reopen and flights could be rerouted.
That’s the country that President Trump has now called “nasty” and “among the worst nations in the world to deal with.” A nation that has been “ripping off” the US for decades isn’t one that will take in your people when their planes are grounded and borders are sealed off. The US-Canada border is the longest undefended border in the world and for a good reason. Canadians are not just our neighbors to the north. They’re our friends.
None of this means that Canada is purely innocent. Its dairy protections are real, softwood lumber has been a recurring problem for decades, and provincial restrictions on American alcohol genuinely burden brewers and distillers. Canada has certainly taxed its own citizens with tariffs against the US over the last several decades. But the solution to Canadian protectionism is more trade liberalization, not a 50-percent tax wall through the middle of North American production.
In a Fact Sheet released by the White House, President Trump points out that the US “economy is approximately 13 times larger than the Canadian economy” and is “home to over eight times as many people.” He thinks this gives us “clear leverage.” But leverage isn’t measured by how large your market is. Viewing trade as purely transactional misses the relational aspect, which matters significantly more.
The truth is that Canada does need the United States. But it’s also true that the United States needs Canada (and Mexico, too). We need the cross-border production networks that help American workers, including those in the US, compete. We need the trust that allows firms on both sides of the border to invest, specialize, cooperate, and build together.
If we want to continue seeing “American-Made” products on our shelves and in our driveways, we should be honest about what that label has always meant: North American-Made. The neighbor who supplies steel and manufacturing components is the same one that opened its doors to stranded Americans on the worst day we’ve seen in generations.
A trade relationship with an ally and friend like Canada is one worth preserving.