President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico went into effect March 4, in addition to a doubling of the 10 percent universal tariff on imports from China to 20 percent.
Trump confirmed in a Truth Social post on Feb. 27 that the plan would move forward, pointing toward illicit drugs such as fentanyl being smuggled into the United States from neighboring countries. He said the tariffs will be in place until these countries take major steps to prevent trafficking.
“We cannot allow this scourge to continue to harm the USA, and therefore, until it stops, or is seriously limited, the proposed TARIFFS scheduled to go into effect on MARCH FOURTH will, indeed, go into effect, as scheduled,” Trump wrote.
Trump agreed in early February to delay the tariffs for 30 days after Canada and Mexico took measures to better secure their borders with the United States. Canada established a fentanyl czar, while Mexico deployed 10,000 National Guard members to its northern border.
The U.S. president has imposed a 25 percent tariff on Canada and Mexico, except for oil and electricity from Canada, which will see a 10 percent tariff.
While Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum plans to unveil a plan on March 11, Canada has already responded.
“Should American tariffs come into effect tonight, Canada will, effective 12:01 a.m. EST tomorrow, respond with 25 per cent tariffs against $155 billion of American goods—starting with tariffs on $30 billion worth of goods immediately, and tariffs on the remaining $125 billion on American products in 21 days’ time,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a statement on March 3.
The prime minister said tariffs will remain until the United States withdraws its tariffs.
“While we urge the U.S. administration to reconsider their tariffs, Canada remains firm in standing up for our economy, our jobs, our workers, and for a fair deal,” he stated.
The Epoch Times spoke with numerous experts about the tariffs’ implications for consumers.
UCLA Professor Christopher S. Tang expects Trump’s tariff strategy to have negative economic consequences for Americans in the form of higher prices for consumer goods, including electronics, clothing, and automobiles.
“Higher prices would affect low-income households more severely because their expenditure of these goods represent a higher percentage of their income,” Tang told The Epoch Times.
Jerry Nickelsburg, adjunct professor of economics at UCLA, agrees with his colleague, opining that the tariffs will raise prices on the affected goods.
“A tariff is a sales tax on a set of goods based on where they were produced,” said Nickelsburg. “This will increase the rate of inflation in the near term.”
Stewart Prest, a political science lecturer at the University of British Columbia, said consumers will feel the pinch of tariffs.
“Goods on both sides of the border will end up getting more expensive, and the industries that were supplying markets on the other side of the border—on both sides—will suffer as a result,” he said. “And the effect will be particularly extreme in some specific sectors of the economy, such as the automotive industry in Ontario and Quebec, and in the United States.”
Meanwhile, University of British Columbia Assistant Professor Torsten Jaccard said it is difficult to determine who will be the winners and losers with such tariffs.
“If it is the goal of the U.S. to weaken economic allies in order to produce more goods domestically, then tariffs may succeed to some extent in accomplishing those goals,” he told The Epoch Times.
Jaccard believes it has served the United States well to be part of a global alliance of economically stable democracies, but if Americans feel this alliance is no longer necessary to their well-being, that is their decision to make.
“It should be noted that while the proposed tariffs will likely make life more expensive for Americans, the aggregate costs will likely be borne by Canadians: we rely on selling goods to the U.S. to a much greater extent than the U.S. relies on buying goods produced in Canada,” Jaccard said.
Jeff Ferry, Chief Economist Emeritus at the Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA), said that the purpose of the tariffs is to stimulate domestic production.
“Mexico assembles approximately 3 million cars a year to ship into the U.S. market,” he said. “If you go back a few decades, those cars were assembled in the U.S. So, if we put a 25 percent tariff on Mexico, it’s very likely that some—not all, but some—of that car production will, over time, migrate back to the U.S.”
He said other examples are in the steel and aluminum industry.
A 25 percent tariff should put some downward pressure on the volume of shipments of steel and aluminum coming in from Mexico, he said.
“There’s other industries as well, where Mexican exports into the U.S. have led to Americans losing jobs. So it’s very likely that a 25 percent tariff will reverse some of that trend—not all of it, but some of it.”
“We can use tariffs to refund $1,200 per household each year, and do it to everybody, excluding the very rich. So, it’s actually a progressive tax refund. In other words, it’s benefiting the poor more than the rich. That’s definitely a viable possibility,” he said.
It’s a proposal he urges Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent and director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought to strongly consider.
Gerald Celente, publisher of the Trends Journal, views tariffs as a positive for the United States under one condition: that Trump sticks to his proposal to eliminate income tax.
“We believe that in some aspects, tariffs will be very beneficial for America,” Celente told The Epoch Times. “The reasons being that if he puts tariffs on, will he do away with income tax? Because when we had tariffs, we didn’t have income tax, and they didn’t invent that until Woodrow Wilson created the Federal Reserve, brought us into World War I, and gave us the IRS and federal income tax. We didn’t have it back then.”
“So it’s very positive for that reason,” he said.
He also thinks that tariffs could help bring manufacturing back to the United States.
“Once upon a time, America used to be a manufacturing nation,” Celente said. “Now two-thirds of our GDP is consumer spending, and only 11 percent manufacturing.”
Celente relayed a story of how, when one of his aunts passed away, he received dishes made by the company Syracuse China.
“They were made in Syracuse, New York,” he said. “We had manufacturing all over the country. But when we started exporting manufacturing—first with NAFTA and then to China with the World Trade Organization—wages went down.”
Manufacturing pays a much higher percentage of wages than the service sector, he said. The service sector jobs left over pay very low wages.
“On that level it would be very positive, but it’s going to take time, if they do it properly,” he said.
