The trade quarrel between Washington and Ottawa over automobiles has now reached store shelves stocked with shampoo and chocolate powder. Under a proclamation signed last week and effective October 30, Canadian corrugated cartons, plastic bags, thin plywood, refrigeration units and bottling machinery drop off the list of goods carrying a 50 percent additional duty, while sweetened cocoa powder, acrylic paints, shampoo, soap, vinyl and wood flooring, fiberboard and several grades of paper are added, the proclamation states. The penalty stacks on top of any national-security tariffs already owed on the same shipments. For importers, the switch leaves little time to reclassify goods already in transit.
The duties grew out of a finding this summer that Canada's tariff treatment of motor vehicles put American exporters at a disadvantage. They rest on Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a rarely used provision that lets a president levy duties of up to 50 percent on a country judged to discriminate against U.S. commerce and to amend or withdraw those orders whenever he deems it in the public interest. According to the proclamation's recital, the duties were announced in July, briefly paused in August after Canada signaled it would remove the disputed measures, and took hold on August 22 once Washington concluded Ottawa had backed away from that commitment. A September proclamation already reshaped the product list once. The latest order is the second rewrite since then, and it says the changes stay in force until expressly suspended or revoked.
The timing has drawn notice well beyond customs brokers. The Associated Press reported that the exemptions were intended to help Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican facing a difficult reelection race, who had criticized the Canada tariffs during a campaign stop. Maine shares a long border with Canada, and wood and paper products feature prominently on both the removed and added lists. The proclamation itself frames the revision only as serving the public interest while still offsetting the burden on U.S. commerce.
Implementation now falls to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which may issue further technical corrections to the tariff schedule through Federal Register notices. The document is slated for official publication on October 30, the same day the new rates begin.