Donald Trump neglected to mention a critical fact in his complaint that Canada imposed tariffs above 200 percent on dairy products imported from the U.S., according to a fact checker.
Those steep tariffs snapped into place only after the U.S. hit a certain quantity – negotiated by Trump himself – of tariff-free dairy sales to Canada each year, and the American dairy industry acknowledges it's not hitting it's zero-tariff maximum in any individual category of dairy products – and many categories, including milk, it's not even meeting half of that ceiling, reported CNN's Daniel Dale.
"Trump also made a claim that is simply false," Dale wrote. "He told reporters Friday that the situation with Canadian dairy tariffs was 'well taken care of' at the time his first presidency ended, 'but under Biden, they just kept raising it.'"
Canada did not, in fact, raise its dairy tariffs during Joe Biden's presidency, as both government documents show and dairy industry groups confirmed, but the tariffs that Trump denounced were actually left in place by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, that Trump negotiated and signed in 2018 – and which he has boasted was “the best trade deal ever made.”
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The president threatened to retaliate with new U.S. dairy tariffs, but Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said over the weekend that wouldn't happen until April 2, when Trump has said he would slap reciprocal tariffs on various countries.
Trump did manage to extract some concessions from Canada, according to Dale, who said the terms of USMCA guaranteed that the northern neighbor wouldn't apply tariffs to specific amounts of yearly imports in 14 dairy categories, and Canada also agreed to increase those quotas over time and give American farmers and companies more access to the Canadian market.
"But the USMCA didn’t get Canada to lower the tariffs that apply to imports above the quota thresholds," Dale wrote. "And contrary to Trump’s Friday claim, those tariffs didn’t spike under Biden."
