Now, I want to be fair to the tariff. It is, after all, a very serious number. Fifty percent. That is not a rounding error. That is a philosophy. That is a man who looked at a trade relationship spanning two thousand miles of shared border, a century of mutual commerce, and approximately one Canadian who has never been rude to anyone, and said: half. Just, half of all of it. Off the top. Consider it a service fee for the privilege of being adjacent.
The stated occasion, as best as anyone can reconstruct it, is that Canada exists and has not yet apologized sufficiently for doing so. There may also have been a wildfire. There is always a wildfire now. The logic runs something like this: Canada has trees, the trees caught fire, the smoke drifted south, and therefore Canadian lumber should cost fifty percent more to import into a country that uses lumber to build houses that are currently unaffordable. This is what economists call a supply-side solution, provided the supply you are trying to reduce is housing and the side you are on is not the buyer’s.
To the administration’s credit, this is consistent. A tariff, properly understood, is a tax. The President has discovered that he can levy taxes on the American consumer without calling them taxes, which is the kind of definitional breakthrough that keeps philosophy professors employed and grocery shoppers confused. The genius of the system is that the foreign country gets the blame and the domestic shopper gets the bill. Canada does not pay the 50%. The taco does. The two-by-four does. The thing you are trying to afford does.
A retributive tariff, the administration would like you to know, is a negotiating tool. It signals toughness. It conveys resolve. It tells our trading partners that we mean business — specifically, that we mean to conduct less of it, at higher prices, until someone blinks. The only question is who blinks first: Canada, which has other customers, or the American lumber yard, which has one President.
Fifty percent is a bold number. It is also, coincidentally, the discount you receive when a policy dissolves under its own weight and quietly disappears into the next news cycle. Watch for the sale.