U.S. hits Canada, 59 other countries with new tariffs just days after 50% levy on Canadian goods announced

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer arrives at the National Palace in Mexico City for a round of CUSMA talks, on July 23, 2026. Photo by YURI CORTEZ/AFP via Getty Images

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U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer announced on Thursday that President Donald Trump is taking more tariff action against Canada, as well as 59 other economies.

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This comes just three days after the USTR invoked the never-before-used Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 to introduce anti-discrimination tariffs against roughly 5 per cent of Canadian goods imported into the U.S. — at a whopping 50 per cent.

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Greer said the White House is imposing the new tariffs under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 against 60 economies following a forced labour investigation, which launched in March.

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The USTR probe included two rounds of public hearings and more than 2,100 public comments, resulting in findings that the economies — Canada and Mexico were lumped together with China and dozens of other countries — were not sufficiently screening goods produced by child or forced labour.

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“President Trump recognizes that decades of moral suasion have not eradicated forced labor from global supply chains,” Greer said in a statement. 

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“The United States has had a forced labor import ban for nearly a century, and rigorously enforces it; it’s well past time for our trading partners to do the same.”

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But trade experts say this has little to do with forced labour.

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“The Trump administration has shown little actual concern so far for human rights,” said Andrew Hale, fellow for Washington-based Advancing American Freedom. 

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“The Trump administration is using forced labour as an excuse to impose tariffs just as they declared emergencies under IEEPA to impose tariffs,” he added.

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Including Canada in the investigation had surprised trade experts back in March.

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Canada’s inclusion “was unbelievably shocking to me,” Clark Packard, research fellow at Cato’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, said at the time.

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“This poisons the well in terms of any USMCA negotiation,” he added.

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Investigations under Section 301, which follow a formalized process of consultations and hearings, usually take a year to complete. But U.S. trade officials had said they expected the probes to be completed by mid-summer — expedited, trade watchers said, to replace the time-limited Section 122 duties imposed after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the IEEPA tariffs.

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“The administration is trying to recreate what they lost when the Supreme Court shot that abuse of power down,” Hale said.

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The new duties have been set up under three categories: 10 per cent for countries with forced-labor prohibitions, including Canada and Mexico; 10-12.5 per cent net of Most-Favoured-Nation rates for some products from the EU, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Switzerland; and 12.5 per cent for the remaining countries.