The Trump administration is at it again with tariffs, this time against almost all of America's major trading partners, with the pretext being that they are not pulling their weight on preventing the importation of goods manufactured using forced labour, which unfairly disadvantages the USA.
After the US Supreme Court struck down Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs (levied, illegally as it turned out, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act), he needed to find another way to impose tariffs, because that seems to be the sum total of his economic policy. What his highly-paid lawyers and policy wonks came up with this time was to use Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act to impose tariffs of 10%-12.5% on 60 countries (including Canada) that they say are not doing enought to enforce the import ban on goods produced using forced/slave labour. Canada, however, should be largely protected from the tariffs due to its participation in the USMCA/CUSMA ageeement.
It's a bit of a stretch, and it's hard to see the current US regime taking the moral high ground on ANYTHING. But, to some extent, in this area, they are probably right.
Canada does have laws around forced labour imports, and there are specific provisions built into USMCA/CUSMA which prohibit the importation of goods produced wholly or partly by forced labour. But enforcement does seem to be lax. While Canada has intercepted 50 shipments on suspicion of forced labour conteventions since 2020, just 2 were ultimately turned away. The Coalition Against Forced Labour has called Canada out on this, and auditors from PwC agree that enforcement has been far from perfect. This will all no doubt also come up in some detail at the USMCA renegotiations later this year.
I confess, the first thing that occurred to me after I heard the news about the new tariffs was, "I bet America doesn't enforce their forced labour rules any better than we do!" Former Liberal MP John McKay, who was involved in the original implementation of the Canadian laws around it, notes that the US still allows private American firms to use exports with prison labour, and it does not adequately enforce its own laws on forced labour imports, such as the Biden-era Uyghur Forced labour Prevention Act.
Actually, though, the US does seem to be enforcing that specifc law quite well, as well as the terms of the Tariff Act of 1930 insofar as they relate to the products of forced labour. Some 6,300 shipments were denied entry in 2024 alone (although that was pre-Trump; figures for 2025 do not seem to be available).
That said, most people seem pretty sure that the Trump regime is not doing this out of moral outrage. They are doing it as "an excuse to impose the tariffs that they wanted to do anyway", as one European diplomat put it, adding that it's completely implausible that all these US trading partners are equally guilty - all 60 major trading partners appear to have failed to meet the bar the US has arbitrarily set - and there seems to be little or no proof being offered. Human rights groups also caution that, while the problem of forced labour does exist, the US tariffs are not the way to deal with it.
I have looked previously at the whole issue of forced labour in Xinjiang, China - because that is essentially what we are talking about here - and it is not as black-and-white an issue as it might appear. But the bottom line is, Trump is effectively using any justification he can to impose tariffs (because he's a "tariff guy", don't you know?), and if he can also engineer a hit on China at the same time, then all well and good.
These new tariffs cannot be imposed immediately, but must go through a period of public comment and review, starting with hearings in July. Given how many legal set-backs Trump has experienced in recent months, the tariffs are not the slam dunk they may have been a year ago.
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