U.S. launches new tariff, replacing what Supreme Court struck down

The Trump administration is imposing a new global tariff regime designed to take the place of a temporary 10 per cent tariff that expires Friday.

The replacement tariffs will apply to goods from Canada, the European Union and nearly 60 other countries.

However, Canadian exports that are compliant with the rules of origin in the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement will be exempt. That means no change to either the rate or the scope of U.S. President Donald Trump’s existing tariffs on Canadian products. 

The U.S. justification for the new tariff is that the countries have failed to do enough to keep products made by forced labour out of their supply chains.

This follows a U.S. trade representative investigation this spring into whether 59 countries plus the European Union are effectively banning the importation of goods produced with forced labour.

The investigation declared that every U.S. trading partner failed to meet the bar.

‘We’re not in favour of sweatshops’

“We’re not in favour of sweatshops, and we don’t want anyone else to be in favour of it either,” U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told CNN late Thursday afternoon, shortly after announcing the tariffs.

Forced labour is just the latest of the Trump administration’s shifting justifications for its tariff regimes. The changes have been forced upon them largely by the legal system, because of limits to the president’s powers to impose tariffs.

The new tariffs take the place of a temporary 10 per cent levy that Trump imposed in February, immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down his original global tariff regime. 

That replacement tariff was time-limited to five months, so its July 24 expiration date was long-expected.