06/03/2026
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If you're an American buying anything affected by this specific tariff, please write your representative and point out how it is wrong based on the laws cited in this article, and demand that they, personally, justify why you are paying for it.
Make them squirm.
Make them understand that you are holding them accountable, even if they are a Democrat.
Oh, the irony is thick this morning.
The United States put another tariff on its own citizens and businesses who want to buy Canadian products. Ten percent.
Why? Do you want the reason Trump gives, or the real reason?
The real reason is that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down many of Trump's previous tariffs, so he's just digging out new laws from between the chesterfield cushions to try for a while.
But his version would be funny, if it weren't so serious.
He says Canada, and a handful of other countries affected by this new tariff, aren't doing enough to stop forced labour.
Canada. The country that passed the Fighting Against Forced Labour and Child Labour in Supply Chains Act two years ago.
The country that has an outright ban on importing goods produced in any way by forced labour. It also requires companies and government bodies to report annually on even the risk of it happening in their supply chain. The U.S. doesn't require anything like that.
Canada is also a signatory to all of the UN's Forced Labour Conventions. The U.S. still hasn't bothered to ratify even the core Forced Labour Convention.
So why? Why would a country with the largest economy in the world, the world's largest importer, controlling the world's dominant reserve currency, home to the two largest stock exchanges — why are they so afraid to honour international standards against forced labour?
The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution permits slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime. It's still on the books.
And you might say, well, there are lots of laws technically on the books, but forced labour isn't really happening.
More than 76 percent of incarcerated workers in the United States say they are required to work or face additional punishment. Solitary confinement. Loss of family visits. Sentence extensions. At least 22 states have programs where for-profit companies run factories inside prisons.
We're being lectured about labour exploitation by a country where prison workers earn as little as 12 cents an hour — or nothing — can't refuse to work, and have no meaningful protection under federal labour law.
Even if you agree that prisoners should be treated that way, even if you don't care that roughly 38 percent of American prisons are filled with Black people despite Black Americans making up only 13 percent of the population, even if the people are there not because they were convicted of a crime, but because they can't afford bail — you have to admit that's the literal definition of forced labour.
We have our own issues. Enforcement on that supply chain law has been spotty at times.
But Canadians do one thing the U.S. often doesn't bother to do: we try. We see injustice, and we try to fix it. We don't always do it the right way, and sometimes it takes a century to even start walking the long road, but we try.
Canada is a country that keeps score on itself, that writes the law even before the problem is solved, that signs the convention even when it's inconvenient.
Call that virtue signalling if you must.
But that's just virtue.
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