'Canadian people loathe this idea': CNN fact checker rips Trump's 'wildly unpopular' claim
March 13, 2025
CNN's Daniel Dale examined some of Donald Trump's claims about Canada and found them lacking in proof.
The president has imposed steep tariffs on Canadian imports, which has triggered retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports, and threatened to annex the nation's northern neighbor as the "51st state," which he claimed had broad support, and Dale walked through his claims justifying the sudden turn against the longtime ally.
"The Canadian people loathe this idea, it is wildly unpopular," Dale said. "One recent poll showed 85 percent opposition to 9 percent in favor. I've seen opposition as high as 90 percent, so you can certainly find individual Canadians who support it, but the Canadian public writ large? Absolutely not."
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Trump also claimed on social media that Canada was one of the highest-tariff nations in the world, which Dale marked down as false.
"Canada, in terms of global comparisons, is a low-tariff country," Dale said. "The World Bank published a list of 137 countries, trade-weighted average tariffs in 2022. Canada ranked 102nd from the top, so not even close to the top. In fact, according to that data, Canada had a lower average tariff than the United States. Canada was at 1.37 percent, the U.S. was at 1.49 percent. Canada was also lower in a simple average that didn't weight by volumes of trade."
"So it is true that, as president Trump repeatedly says, Canada has high dairy tariffs, but he doesn't mention two things," Dale added. "First of all, those are the exception, not the norm. Almost all U.S. agricultural trade with Canada gets to Canada tariff-free and quota-free, as the U.S. government acknowledges on the Department of Agriculture website, and No. 2, he doesn't mention that those high dairy tariffs only kick in after the U.S. reaches a certain Trump-negotiated quantity of tariff-free dairy sales to Canada, and the U.S. is not currently even close to those quota limits, so the tariffs aren't even actually being applied at the moment."
The president has claimed Canada doesn't allow American banks to do business there while their financial institutions flood the U.S., and Dale said that was also untrue.
"It's not true," he said. "U.S. banks have been operating in Canada for well over a century. More than a dozen are currently operating in Canada today. The Canadian Banking Association says it is 16, and those include well-known names: Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, JPMorgan, Bank of America. They represent about half of all foreign bank assets in Canada. Now, it is true that Canada has strict regulation over its banking sector, and some of those regulations have discouraged many foreign banks from opening retail branches in Canada. But first of all, they're not prohibited from operating from doing commercial corporate banking, investment banking, and, second of all, that's not a prohibition."
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