🇨🇦 Ottawa’s tariff theatre sacrifices Main Street

The sharpest part of this stunt is the admission baked right into it: Ottawa slapped tariffs on $28 billion in U.S. imports across nearly 700 products, then everyone pretends consumers will barely notice while small business gets flattened. Translation: the regime found the perfect cannon fodder. As reported, retailers absorbed 75 per cent of tariff costs last year, and now furniture sellers like JS Furniture, with 60 per cent of sales tied to U.S. goods, are expected to just bleed quietly for the national photo op.

This is Trudeau-era economics after Trudeau: punish your own producers, call it resolve, and let bureaucrats at CBSA hand out vague guidance while family businesses eat 25 to 50 per cent levies on dressers, mirrors, steel, aluminum, even toilet paper. Dan Kelly says firms feel like cannon fodder because they are. Ottawa talks sovereignty, but governs like a performative branch office of global trade management, forever staging symbolic fights while Canadians pay the invoice. Real national interest would mean rebuilding domestic capacity first, not using small business as expendable props.

🍁 Maple Chronicles