#it's nice to think it won't affect canadians at all but it provides a spark to trade war and that will affect everyone north of the border

[awkward-teabag]

There's also how much Canadians/Canadian companies buy that's either from the US or enters it. Yes Canadians don't have to pay tariffs on those (at least nothing that's been announced) but that's not to say American company would increase costs of that either out of retaliation or to spread the tariffs they have to pay around to more than just Americans.

Or they simply get greedy and massive blanket tariffs provide a great excuse to increase prices that wouldn't have gone over well otherwise.

There's also the chance of a trade war and protracted legal battle. The softwood lumber dispute has been going on since the 80s in one form or another and has resulted in Canadians losing jobs and massive increases in lumber prices both in Canada and the US, for example. It's not the only reason for lumber prices to increase but the US doubling the tariffs on Canadian softwood then doubling those tariffs again in less than 5 years sure didn't help.

It's also naive to think no American company will try to get Canadians/Canadian companies to pay any or all of the tariffs so that American customers won't be affected by a price increase.

And yes, most goods and raw resources produced or extracted in Canada are sold to the US. There will be less demand for them if there's an extra 25% fee slapped on to them and it provides a leverage point where importers could, say, demand the Canadian company cover part of the cost or the importer will reduce or stop importing Canadian goods/resources at all.

If a company largely sells to Americans, they're suddenly in a bind if they can't get a domestic buyer or non-American foreign buyer to cover it. Either they'll have to drastically scale down business as demand goes down or will end up sitting on stock that now has no buyer.

Canada's economy is largely real estate and resource exports and is tied extremely closely to the American economy. Geography impedes our ability to shrug and find another buyer for a similar cost, too. But I cannot overstate how some American companies will use this as an excuse to slap retaliatory tariffs on goods Canadians import even if the 25% tariff on Canadian (and Mexican) goods is there because of the US government.

Why would tarrifs on Canadian goods hurt Canadians, not just Americans? America companies have to pay and it will affect Americans not us.

It will effect us. If its more expensive for Americans to import Canadian goods, they'll just import less goods from Canada, which will hurt Canadian businesses. Something like 80% of Canada's exports go to the USA.