Hiking Tariffs on Canada, Trump Demands 'Adequate Steps' To Achieve an Impossible Drug War Goal
Canada accounts for a tiny percentage of fentanyl smuggling, which cannot be stopped by trying harder.
On Thursday, President Donald Trump raised his general tariff on Canadian goods from 25 percent to 35 percent. Why? Something something fentanyl something. I will try to unpack that argument, but I warn you: The closer you look at it, the less sense it makes.
A few weeks after he was elected, Trump said he planned to "charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States." He complained that "thousands of people are pouring through Mexico and Canada, bringing Crime and Drugs at levels never seen before." He averred that "both Mexico and Canada have the absolute right and power to easily solve this long simmering problem" and warned that the 25 percent import tax "will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!"
The implication that Canada was largely responsible for illicit fentanyl trafficking was puzzling. "Canada is not known to be a major source of fentanyl, other synthetic opioids, or precursor chemicals to the United States," a congressionally appointed commission noted in a 2022 report. In FY 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 43 pounds of fentanyl at the northern border, compared to about 21,000 pounds at the southern border.
Trump's contention that Mexico and Canada could "easily solve" the drug trafficking problem was equally dubious. For more than a century, politicians have been promising to "stop the flow" of illegal drugs, and they have never come close to achieving that goal—not for lack of trying, but because the economics of prohibition doom all such efforts.
Prohibition allows traffickers to earn a hefty risk premium that provides a strong incentive to find ways around any barriers that governments manage to erect. Drugs can be produced in many different places, and they can be smuggled into the country in a wide variety of ways. Any serious effort to prevent drugs from entering the United States would entail intolerable disruption of travel and trade, and it still would not succeed. That challenge is magnified in the case of a highly potent drug like fentanyl because large numbers of doses can be transported in small packages that are hard to detect.
Given that reality, Trump's promise that his tariffs would "remain in effect" as long as fentanyl smuggling continued was tantamount to saying the tariffs would be permanent. But if so, they could not possibly serve their advertised function of pressuring Canada and Mexico to try harder.
On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order that declared "a national emergency" involving drug trafficking by "cartels and other organizations." He also issued a proclamation that described the influx of drugs and illegal aliens at the southern border as "a national emergency."
On February 1, Trump extended the latter declaration to include "the flow of illicit drugs across our northern border." Decrying "the failure of Canada to do more," he announced the 25 percent tariff he had previously threatened, invoking his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977. On the same day, citing the same statute, he announced a 25 percent tariff on imports from Mexico and a 10 percent tariff on Chinese goods, which he said was necessary to "address the synthetic opioid supply chain" by encouraging tighter restrictions on fentanyl precursors.
It is not clear whether the IEEPA, which does not mention tariffs and has never been used this way before, authorized those orders. On May 28, the Court of International Trade (CIT) concluded that it did not. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is reviewing the CIT's decision and held a hearing in that case on Thursday.
The CIT panel, which also rejected the much broader "Liberation Day" tariffs that Trump announced on April 2, concluded that he was claiming "an unlimited delegation of tariff authority" that "would be unconstitutional." The court added that the anti-drug tariffs were illegal for another reason: They did not satisfy the criteria laid out in the IEEPA, which authorizes presidential action to "deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States" after the president "declares a national emergency with respect to such threat."
The anti-drug tariffs "rest on a construction of 'deal with' that is at odds with the ordinary meaning of the phrase," the CIT said. "'Deal with' connotes a direct link between an act and the problem it purports to address. A tax deals with a budget deficit by raising revenue. A dam deals with flooding by holding back a river. But there is no such association between the act of imposing a tariff and the 'unusual and extraordinary threat[s]' that the Trafficking Orders purport to combat. [The] collection of tariffs on lawful imports does not evidently relate to foreign governments' efforts 'to arrest, seize, detain, or otherwise intercept' bad actors within their respective jurisdictions."
The CIT's reading of "deal with" is debatable. Even if the IEEPA does not authorize tariffs like these, it indisputably authorizes economic sanctions that may be aimed at changing the policies and practices of foreign governments. That is what Trump claims to be doing here: pressuring Canada, Mexico, and China to cooperate more in the war on drugs.
The CIT did not consider another, more dubious aspect of Trump's IEEPA declarations: He claimed to be addressing a "national emergency" caused by an "unusual and extraordinary threat," which implies a sudden, unanticipated crisis. Drug-related deaths, which have been rising for decades, clearly do not fit that description. Trump himself described drug trafficking as a "long simmering problem."
The tariffs on Canada and Mexico were supposed to take effect on February 4. But the day before that deadline, Trump announced a one-month delay in light of steps that both countries had agreed to take.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said she would assign 10,000 members of Mexico's National Guard to border control. As Mexican journalist Carlos Loret de Mola noted, that was essentially the same deal that Sheinbaum's predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, struck with Trump in 2019 during a similar tariff showdown. Justin Trudeau, Canada's prime minister at the time, won the same dispensation simply by proceeding with preexisting antidrug plans.
That one-month grace period expired on March 4, when the tariffs took effect. Evidently, Mexico and Canada still were not waging the war on drugs enthusiastically enough for Trump's taste. But for some reason, Trump seems especially displeased with Canada.
Announcing the tariff increase on Thursday, Trump said Canada had failed to "take adequate steps to alleviate the illegal migration and illicit drug crises through cooperative enforcement actions." Slighly more specifically, he cited "Canada's lack of cooperation in stemming the flood of fentanyl and other illicit drugs across our northern border—including its failure to devote satisfactory resources to arrest, seize, detain, or otherwise intercept drug trafficking organizations, other drug or human traffickers, criminals at large, and illicit drugs."
Since Canada accounts for only a tiny percentage of fentanyl entering the United States, "flood" seems like an exaggeration. In any case, it is not clear what would qualify as "adequate steps" or "satisfactory resources" as far as Trump is concerned. Taking Trump at his word, there is no such thing, because there is nothing that Canada or Mexico can do that will be sufficient to achieve the impossible goal of stopping illegal drugs from entering the United States.
