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As Canadians obsess, Americans barely register the latest tariff news
On Tuesday, at the eleventh hour, Donald Trump announced that Canada and the U.S. have reached a tentative trade deal, and paused a scheduled 50 per cent tariff on Canadian goods for three more days.
On Wednesday morning, the development featured as the top story on most, if not all, major Canadian news websites, including Bloomberg Canada, CBC, Global News, CTV and here, at National Post. It was also the front page story in today’s Globe and Mail.
But in America, not so much.
Press Gazette puts the New York Times, Fox, CNN and Yahoo Finance as the top news websites in the U.S. by audience and, on Wednesday morning, none of them featured the tariff development as the main story on their homepage.
Scroll down past the top articles on the Times website and you’ll see the headline “Canada gets 3-Day Reprieve From Punishing Trump Tariffs,” but the development didn’t get a mention on today’s front page.
The news is similarly low down on the CNN and Yahoo Finance homepages, while the highest-placed Canada story on the Fox News website is about WNBA star Sophie Cunningham drawing boos during a game against Toronto Tempo.
This lack of prominence may well be a judgement based on audience interest. After all, a poll from the Angus Reid Institute published on Aug. 9 found that Canadians are much more likely (91 per cent) than Americans (69 per cent) to be following news about the latest tariffs.
Meanwhile, a quick Google search of “tariffs” from Canada versus with a VPN based in the U.S. shows a stark difference between the websites Canadians are served compared to their southern neighbours.
While a Canadian user will see dozens of news reports about the latest development, the U.S. search results page shows an AI overview of what a tariff is, followed by a string of think tank and government websites. Trade negotiations seem to matter a whole lot more north of the border.
And Joseph Steinberg, Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto, has an idea of why this is. He tells National Post that, regardless of the specifics, “when it comes to tariffs, it’s always much more important for Canada than it is for the United States.”
The U.S. economy is ten times bigger than Canada’s, he points out, so “all of these trade issues are roughly 10 times more important for us than they are for the United States.”
A tentative deal would mean avoiding a levy on roughly $28 billion worth of Canadian goods — something which economists have said would hit certain businesses and industries “extremely hard.”
And Steinberg adds that while 50 per cent tariffs could potentially lead to job losses and plant shutdowns in Canada, the same would not be the case for the U.S. — though it would mean some products would be more expensive for American consumers.
In addition, people in the U.S. are “undoubtedly” paying more attention to the war in Iran, Steinberg says, as well as local elections — both of which are likely to push trade negotiations further down the agenda.
“Quite honestly, there are things that Americans perceive as being more important than (trade negotiations) this week,” he adds.
Meanwhile, Trump has said that U.S. farmers and manufacturers will be “thrilled” with the tentative trade deal with Canada. He made the comments during a press conference in Washington on Wednesday, adding, “Basically, we have no tariffs going into Canada anymore.”
This comes as U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told reporters in Washington that the deal eliminated “some of the irritants” of the last year, while Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc swore that Canada’s supply management system remained “entirely intact.”
In the PM’s statement on Tuesday, Carney did not outline which concessions, if any, Canada may have made.
“Substantial progress has been made, although there is important work still to be done,” he said. “Canada remains focused on building a stronger, more independent, and more competitive economy at home.”
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