Never forget that Canadians - who think that things are free of charge - voted for it:
As August 1 quietly slipped by, so did Canada’s last, best chance to avoid a sharp escalation in trade tensions with its most important economic partner. Unlike Mexico, which secured a temporary reprieve, Canada is now fully exposed to a 35% tariff imposed by the United States on a range of non-USMCA-covered goods. For the Canadian agri-food sector — and for consumers from coast to coast — this is less a policy adjustment and more a gut punch.
Prime Minister Mark Carney — the seasoned economist who campaigned on his negotiating acumen and international gravitas — is failing. Instead of delivering results, Parliament was sent home for the summer, and Ottawa’s silence echoed through what is arguably Canada’s most consequential trade dispute in a generation.
To be clear, not all food exports are affected. Products covered under USMCA quotas — dairy, poultry, and some meat — remain exempt. But for producers of grains, oilseeds, processed foods, and niche value-added products, this 35% tariff is a major blow.
Margins in agri-food are notoriously thin. For many exporters, the choice is binary: absorb the cost, or exit the U.S. market. Either path reduces revenues, heightens the risk of layoffs, and weakens Canada’s competitive position. With the U.S. absorbing over half of our agri-food exports annually, this is no minor hiccup — it’s a strategic failure.
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In May, Canada had the lowest level of job vacancies in eight years as the number of jobs dropped in several industries, according to the latest numbers from Statistics Canada.
Job vacancies dropped by 4.1 percent (20,400), StatCan said in a July 31 release. It was the lowest rate since October 2017.
On a year-over-year basis, the number of available jobs dropped by 15.8 percent to 89,700, StatCan said. ...
The job vacancy rate, which is the number of vacant positions as a proportion of total labour demand, declined slightly to 2.7 percent in May, compared to 2.8 percent in April. In May 2024, that number was 3.2 percent.
Industries that saw the largest decrease in job vacancies included construction (13.5 percent or 5,400); professional, scientific, and technical services (10.8 percent or 4,100); mining, quarrying, oil and gas extraction (19.2 percent, 900); and management of companies and enterprises (18 percent, 400).
The job vacancies in Canada’s construction industry was the lowest level recorded since November 2019, StatCan said.
The professional, scientific, and technical services sector saw its first decrease in job vacancies since December 2024, according to the report. The number of vacancies in the sector was the lowest since May 2018.
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Both Canada and the United States saw their unemployment rates shoot up to over 13 percent during the height of the pandemic in 2020, if the same methodology is used to calculate the figures for both, as the two countries use different definitions. By late 2022, both countries had returned to their pre-pandemic averages of around 5 percent and 3.5 percent respectively.
However, Canada’s unemployment rate has since risen to hit 6.9 percent in June, while the United States has seen that metric rise to just 4.1 percent.
According to several economists, this discrepancy is due to factors like Canada’s comparatively high immigration rates and the strength of the U.S. economy.
Jack Mintz, president’s fellow of the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary, said Canada’s “very large immigration inflow” since 2023 has pushed unemployment higher, particularly among young Canadians.
Mintz also said imports represent a smaller percentage of the American gross domestic product (GDP) than they do for Canada, which makes the country less economically vulnerable to the recent trade turbulence, while a stronger Canadian loonie has made its exports less competitive and contributed to higher unemployment.
Eric Miller, trade analyst and president of Rideau Potomac Strategy Group, said there has historically been stronger job creation in the United States as well as higher “job destruction,” allowing it to adjust faster to economic changes and recover from recessions.
Livio Di Matteo, an economics professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., said Canada’s average monthly unemployment rate has been 7.2 percent between 1955 and 2025, while in the United States it has been around 5.2 percent. He said American workers are typically more mobile and the U.S. labour market has historically been more competitive than Canada’s, allowing for fuller employment.
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The federal government spends more than $1.3 billion annually on contracts with American suppliers, even as officials question the long-term impact of relying on U.S. firms for defence and non-defence procurement.
According to a Department of Public Works briefing note titled Impact Of Tariffs On Procurement, Canadian federal departments awarded an average of $1.3 billion per year to U.S.-based suppliers over the past three years.
Blacklock's Reporter says the figure excludes contracts with Canadian subsidiaries of U.S. companies and purchases through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales program.
“These amounts do not take into account the origin of the goods and services, i.e. where they are made,” the note says, adding that the department has not calculated the total benefits to American contractors.
The note is dated March 13, shortly after former prime minister Justin Trudeau accused U.S. President Donald Trump of trying to undermine Canada.
“His goal is to destroy the Canadian economy so he can try to annex the country,” Trudeau told reporters. “That seems to be what he wants.”
Trudeau also signaled a review of procurement policies that favour American suppliers, suggesting the federal government would re-evaluate how it awards contracts.
“I won’t sugar coat it,” he said. “This is going to be tough.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney echoed those concerns in his March 23 campaign launch, saying Trump “wants to break us so America can own us.”
He pledged to shift more procurement to Canadian companies, especially in the defence sector.
“Eighty percent of our capital spending in defence is in the United States, not Canada,” Carney said in February while campaigning for Liberal leadership.
“It is also about spending that money wisely and effectively and above all as much as possible — potentially the majority of the increase in that money — spent here in Canada as opposed to the United States.”
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If I were PSAC, I would very much want to highlight the good all those extra public workers did for frontline services. I haven’t seen that; instead they focus mostly on the cuts themselves. So I asked the union for some examples.
A spokesperson argued the public service had to be rebuilt after Stephen Harper-era cuts. She reminded me in particular of the debacle over closing regional Veterans’ Affairs offices, which created a very off-brand conflict between the Conservative government and the military. She argued rolling out emergency benefits during the pandemic would have been impossible without extra staff. That’s certainly plausible, but that was inherently not a permanent need. The CRA started shedding employees after the pandemic under the Trudeau government.
It would behoove the unions to provide more examples, if any exist, if they really want to save all these jobs. Because people tend to remember negative interactions with government much more than they do positive ones. Not every call to CRA or visit to the passport office is a disaster, obviously. But you’ll hear far more about the disasters around the water cooler than you will about times it all went as it should have. I have never encountered anyone arguing we’re far better off for those 100,000 extra employees. I very much suspect we are not.
Naturally, the bloat isn’t just among frontline workers. A memo from Chief Human Resources Officer Jacqueline Bogden, obtained by National Post, indicates an intention to target government executives as well — their number having ballooned in recent years, and not, Bogden thinks, for any particularly good reason.
“New (executive) jobs at all levels are created, in many cases without a significant change in the organization’s mandate,” her memo reads. “In essence, this can mean that the same pie is being sliced in smaller pieces.” She notes a report by the Public Service Management Advisory Committee finding that nearly half of core public service departments have more executives aboard than the officially recommended complement.
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