Wildly Inaccurate List of Canadian tariffs Circulates on Facebook and Other Social Media

by Rod Williams, April 7, 2024- As anyone who uses social media knows or should know, there is a lot of misleading and simply false information appearing on Facebook and other social media. Many people will repost things without looking into the source. One should not accept as true something one reads on Facebook or other social media without knowing the source of the information. Anyone can make up anything and post it. 

The meme to the right, I must have seen thirty or more times on my Facebook page in recent days. I asked posters of this meme to give me the source of this information and no one could provide a source. 

A Google search found a site called AFP Fact Check. This site says the information is false. Some of the items on the list are actually duty-free. It had this to say about other items on the list:

The highest supposed tariffs discussed in the posts were dairy and poultry products, which some users claimed were charged at over 200 percent. Clark explained that Canada has supply management regulations for these types of products, meaning that after an import quota has been reached for a specific exporter, they are charged a much steeper fee (archived here). These measures are allowed under USMCA.

Bruce Muirhead, a history professor at the University of Waterloo (archived here), said Canada instigates supply management quotas on particular items intending to prevent agricultural surpluses within the country's market.

"As its name suggests, they manage supply," he said.

For example, CBSA's list shows milk has an initial tariff of 7.5 percent (with exemptions again for USMCA signatories) but above a certain quantity that could rise to 241 percent for any exporter. This is still less than the 270 percent claimed in the post.

Trump has referenced the 270 percent tariff on milk for years without context, including in claims he made during his first term at the 2018 G7 summit. 

Muirhead said other products mentioned in the social media posts, such as butter, cheese, eggs and poultry, are also regulated by supply management policies. As with milk, the CBSA list shows these items are subject to higher tariffs over initial quotas.

Other research finds that another name for "supply management regulations" is "tariff-rate quota." I will assume that whoever created this meme was using the tariff rate quota. To learn more about tariff rate quota, see the Wikipedia page addressing this and one can also find it explained at other sites. 

In summary, these tariffs rates are only imposed after a certain amount of the product has been imported.  The US has never exceeded those quotas for products exported to Canada and has not even come close. Also, these import caps were agreed to by Donald Trump during the USMCA negotiation.

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