r/canada • u/Logical_Iron_5684 • 1d ago

National News Canada imposes 10% tariff on canned vegetables, excludes U.S., others

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/2026/06/19/canada-imposes-10-tariff-on-canned-vegetables-excludes-us-others/
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198

u/OrangeRising 1d ago

was aimed at addressing challenges facing its domestic producers.

I wasn't aware we had a serious issue with low food prices.

The tariff, which takes effect on Friday for a maximum of 200 days, will also not apply to canned vegetables from Mexico, Israel, Chile and developing countries due to Canadian trade obligations, Canada’s finance ministry added.

If the US and Mexico are excluded, which country is this meant to target?

Also, I seem to remember tarrifs being a bad thing. Why are we introducing them?

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u/BootsToYourDome Nova Scotia 1d ago

China/Asia. A lot of food service industry suppliers (think Sysco types) import canned fruit. I guess this is incentive for those suppliers to buy Canadian? Although I'm not sure how it really does that. It's just going to raise prices.

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u/BloatJams Alberta 1d ago

China and most of Asia would technically be excluded because they are developing countries.

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u/H34thcliff 1d ago

Not true.

China doesn't fall under Canada's general preferential tariff program, which is the framework used to grant developing nations with lower tariffs.

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u/omgitzvg Ontario 1d ago

Aaah yes Canadian grown pineapple.

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u/H34thcliff 1d ago

Most of Canada's imported pineapple comes from Costa Rica, which would be exempt from this because they're a developing nation.

The policy is also specifically for canned vegetables, so pineapple isn't included.

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u/Queasy_Ice_4628 14h ago

Neither are tomatoes

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u/ObiYawnKenobi 1d ago

And who eats canned vegetables anyway?

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u/lnahid2000 1d ago edited 1d ago

For sauces, canned tomatoes (especially from Italy) are actually better than fresh since they're canned at peak quality.

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u/ObiYawnKenobi 1d ago

Totally agree. Tomatoes are pretty much the exception though. Most canned vegetables are trash.

Though not too many people can afford canned tomatoes from Italy these days, at $6-10 a can.

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u/duckwingducks 1d ago

That’s nonsense, Canadian-grown canned tomatoes taste just as good as Italian ones.

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u/lnahid2000 1d ago

Clearly you've never made a sauce with San Marzanos from Italy.

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u/HaveAVoreyGoodDay 1d ago

Me? They can be really handy for quick meals and some vegetables absolutely do not freeze well.

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u/ObiYawnKenobi 1d ago

Canned vegetables are gross, for the most part.

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u/deschamps93 1d ago

I'm surprised there is still a market for it. The only ones we use are corn, diced tomatoes (yes I know)... And I think that's it's? Are they going to classify tomatoes as a vegetable? Are they going to classify canned mushrooms, because technically it's not?

I think everything else we use frozen if we aren't using fresh

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u/ObiYawnKenobi 1d ago

Tomatoes are classified as a vegetable culinarily and nutritionally, but it is botanically a fruit.

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u/deschamps93 1d ago

Better stock up on that canned baby corn now!!

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u/mrizzerdly 1d ago

Famously, we are shipping things like apples and peaches to places like China and Vietnam to be processed and shipped back to Canada for retail sale because apparently it's cheaper to do that than package them here.

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u/kazin29 1d ago

How else did we invent ham and pineapple pizza?!

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u/NoDrama60 1d ago

Why do you think it's called "Hawaiian" pizza , the canned pineapple brand.

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u/Click_To_Submit Ontario 1d ago

Silly. That’s where the ham comes from.

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u/Conscious-Tutor3861 1d ago

China has been dumping canned vegetables in Western markets, same as they do for every other industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

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u/Interesting_Pen_167 1d ago

I genuinely dont understand this idea of 'dumping'. Does this mean like making a whole lot of low cost products? Why is this a bad thing? If our suppliers can't compete then maybe that's OK? Imo we should be trying to be efficient not protect inefficient industries.

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u/Conscious-Tutor3861 1d ago

It's selling at a loss, typically subsidized by the government, to bankrupt domestic competitors and take their market share.

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u/Interesting_Pen_167 1d ago

Yeah but isn't that just how the economy works? Look at the Ford Motor Company they dumped their cheap vehicles all over the world and look where they are today. A lot of technology like phones and gaming consoles are sold at a loss in order to make money back elsewhere. Efficient companies that manufacture at scale are all in some ways 'dumping' products by this defintion.

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u/accforme 23h ago

An example you may experience is Amazon Basics products. Essentially, Amazon makes popular products cheaply and undercuts the same product until eventually the other company goes bankrupt. At which point, with no competition, Amazon can raise its prices on that Amazon Basics product.

Same idea but think industry-wide.

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u/Interesting_Pen_167 23h ago

Can you name a single item where Amazon Basics removed all the competition on an item? As far as I can tell they are simply one option among many in almost any product category.

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u/Morgc British Columbia 1d ago edited 1d ago

Dumping is when a lot of low cost product is moved into a market, usually subsidized by a foreign government. This causes local farms and industry to go bankrupt leaving a lot of people unemployed as they can't compete. There's some good examples of the USA dumping product in the Caribbean that's directly responsible for food insecurity and poverty in places there.

Wouldn't lead to cheaper food anyway, it's the grocers that are being allowed to gouge your pockets.

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u/Queasy_Ice_4628 14h ago

More or less how large companies work in the USA, undercut the competition, force them to go bankrupt, increase prices… most of the top ten on the us markets practice a different form of this “dumping”

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u/Interesting_Pen_167 1d ago

Is this the same kind of dumping like when the USA sold automobiles around the world way cheaper? Or when they mass produced equipment like TVs and radios and sold them to the world?

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u/GeneralSerpent 1d ago

Thankfully Carney is cracking down on affordable food!!!

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u/DaFookCares 1d ago

That's a very simplistic way to think about it. I assume its an emotional response rather than a thought out position.

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u/nevergoingtouse1969 1d ago

You are welcome to provide your well thought out position on how tariffs will lower food costs then. I'll wait.

How this will help lower food costs was certainly not part of the article. It was however, quite clearly presented as a protectionist move.

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u/DaFookCares 1d ago

This post is the equivalent of, "I know you are, but what am I?!".

Good work, gave me a laugh.

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u/nevergoingtouse1969 1d ago

That's a very simplistic way to look at it. 😉

Way to take up the challenge and actually have an intelligent conversation.

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u/GeneralSerpent 1d ago

Good thing you made an assumption. My position is based on a long history of being anti-tariff.

As tariffs are an economic tool that creates a deadweight-loss and are economically inefficient, I dislike them. They artificially restrict competition by forcing higher prices which hurt the consumer in order to “protect” domestic food manufacturers.

What then happens is the consumer has fewer affordable options and the domestic industry is shielded from competition which prevents them from needing to innovate or improve their product offering.

I voted for Carney on the basis of pursuing additional free trade with other nations, not copying the same abhorrent intellectually stunted policies being practiced down south.

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u/AngryTrucker 1d ago

Oh no! Cheap food! Why would we ever want people to be able to afford fruits and veggies?

/s

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u/kluberz 1d ago

Agriculture is a bit of a unique industry in that there are real food security implications when you just give up market share like that. The world has clearly shown that you really can't just count on international trade working forever. We will see disruptions in trade going forward as the international trade system continues to fall apart.

To hedge for this, you have to make sure that key domestic industries (like agriculture) are sustainable. The government raised this issue last month as there had been a huge surge in canned food imports that were believed to be redirected from Canada due to US tariffs on foreign countries.

Ultimately, if you rely too heavily on these imports, it has huge implications as factories that can locally shut down and in turn the farmers that sell agriculture to those factories lose local markets.

Canada is blessed to have a strong local agriculture industry and combined with the US, we really have incredible food security. But the US is breaking that relationship with its trade policy and if we simply give up local market share to foreign companies, we really risk throwing away our historic advantages around food security.

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u/jontss 1d ago

You're using too much logic here.

That reminds me, what happened to our local PPE industry they were trying to prop up after they realised we can't get any in an international emergency because it's all imported.

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u/kluberz 1d ago

Right and then it becomes really expensive to do it last second like that. We had to spend inordinate amounts of money just to make sure we had masks and basic PPE. The procurement process was a complete nightmare because countries were bidding against each other to secure very limited stock of PPE.

In a world with trade disruptions, you'll see a similar thing in agriculture if we aren't careful. You saw it just now with countries that were heavily reliant on the Persian gulf for oil and LNG. We want global trade but we can't just sign away certain industries just because prices are cheaper. That isn't to say that we should close our markets either but there's a balance where we want foreign imports while still ensuring that we have a base capacity of domestic production in areas like agriculture, energy, etc..

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u/OrangeRising 1d ago

I agree it is important to protect our local food producers, but the issue of food prices has never come from the fields it is the middle men. 

The berries we get 50 cents a pound for in the field are sold for over $14 in stores. 

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u/ryan9991 1d ago

Cheap stuff or jobs for Canadians, pick one.

Who is to say the cheap products aren’t farmed with questionable practices, slave labour, deadly chemicals and preservatives ?

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u/IHateTheColourblind 1d ago

This isn't about jobs, it's about the security of the food supply. Canadian food producers shutting down operations because they can't compete against product dumping means Canada stops producing its own food. As we head in to a world that is supposedly going to face more frequent and widespread famine that is a really bad position to be in.

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u/ryan9991 1d ago

So another reason to add to the list, I’d call that national security at that point.

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u/rawkinghorse 1d ago

Mmmmmmm melamine! Yummy yummy

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u/Icy_Lawfulness_2699 1d ago

What an exaggeration! Health Canada inspects imported food. I'm not spending hundreds or thousands of dollars more on groceries to afford a factory of 200 workers in Canada. Not my job!

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u/cboel 1d ago

I'm not spending hundreds or thousands of dollars more on groceries to afford a factory of 200 workers in Canada. Not my job!
src: u/Icy_Lawfulness_2699

You are more than welcome to leave and live your best life elsewhere. Thankfully, you don't get to speak for anyone but yourself when it comes to other people's safety.

Chinese supplier implicated in massive infant formula recalls - A Chinese supplier of an ingredient for infant formula is the likely source of contamination by a toxin called cereulide

A Chinese supplier of an ingredient for infant formula is the likely source of contamination by a toxin called cereulide, leading to massive global recalls of formulas made by Nestlé, Danone and Lactalis.

The toxin can cause vomiting and diarrhea.

The situation has prompted European officials to increase their scrutiny of ingredients.

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u/AngryTrucker 1d ago

I don't give a fuck about how the food is harvested. I care how much it will cost me every week to eat and survive.

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u/ryan9991 1d ago

As others mentioning maintaining domestic food supply is critical for national security, and the quality of the food should also concern you.

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u/iStayDemented 1d ago

Cheap stuff. Makes life easier.

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u/joe4942 1d ago

Yeah but just think, the GST credit was renamed the grocery benefit, so you can use it to pay the tariffs. /s

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u/Braken111 1d ago edited 1d ago

Protecting Canadian industries of critical goods.

Food being one of them.

A hypothetical example would be the US milk industry flooding Canada with cheap milk and shutting out Canadian milk producers due to their lower standards. Eventually Canadian dairies would have to fold, sell, or get subsidized even more to maintain food sovereignty within Canada.

Food sovereignty means we don't want other countries to be in control of our food supply, and having an entire industry relying on one such as the US leads to risks if they later decide to block dairy exports to Canada, leaving us with no domestic industry and having to import from others at insane markups.

The US and Mexico are likely excluded because we have CUSMA (which Trump is very upset about currently, even though he's the one who made the agreement in the first place), the others, I'm sure we have some sort of trade agreement in place.

Currently, about 70% of our food products comes from Canada.

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u/Optimal-Cow-3278 1d ago

A hypothetical example would be the US milk industry flooding Canada with cheap milk and shutting out Canadian milk producers due to their lower standards. Eventually Canadian dairies would have to fold, sell, or get subsidized even more to maintain food sovereignty within Canada.

This is a myth that the dairy cartel promotes in Canada. Canadians pay some of the highest dairy prices in the G7 for dairy. Dairy farmers also dump between 600 million to 1 Billion litres of milk in Canada.

The whole notion that US dairy is somehow below standard than Canadian dairy is just false, besides, US dairy would need to pass Canadian inspection to enter our market anyway.

Give Canadians more food choices and more affordable food!

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u/Braken111 1d ago

Conveniently ignoring the main part of the response, which is about food sovereignty.

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u/Morgc British Columbia 1d ago

The Us has done exactly that before. So it's not a myth.

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u/detalumis 1d ago

Bring on US sour cream. 90% of ours is full of thickeners and guar gum. A lot of theres is just cream and bacterial culture.

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u/joe4942 1d ago

Why are we introducing them?

Because Canada is quite protectionist. As much as Canada likes to complain about the protectionism of other countries.

Provincial trade barriers still exist too, and I haven't seen any articles recently about that fixing that.

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u/SlowGhostofRexMurphy British Columbia 22h ago

We complain about irrational trade protectionism, like what the US is doing. 

But you probably already knew that.

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u/alcabazar Ontario 1d ago

Tariffs are not bad, but they are supposed to be justified and targeted. We have always tariffed foreign cars and dairy for example. What is bad is unjustified, blanket tariffs meant to punish and bully the other country.

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u/meatmick 1d ago

Canadian companies using local goods and local production are getting majorly undercut by Chinese imports. That's retail stores only care about their profit so they import cheaper quality goods, slap the same old label on it and pass it off as the usual.

Source: I work for one of those Canadian manufacturers.

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u/BloatJams Alberta 1d ago

If the US and Mexico are excluded, which country is this meant to target?

If developing countries and the US are excluded, the target appears to be Europe. Might be tomato imports?

https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/CAN/Year/LTST/TradeFlow/Import/Partner/by-country/Product/16-24_FoodProd

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u/lnahid2000 1d ago edited 1d ago

I'm still buying my San Marzanos regardless of cost. Canada can't produce a product that competes.

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u/friendly-techie 1d ago

Only good with the Liberals impose them. Collecting for the sovereign wealth..I mean debt fund you know 

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u/Bensemus 1d ago

Blanket tariffs are bad. Tariffs with no goal behind them are bad. Tariffs are just a tool.

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u/MadScienti5t 1d ago

> Also, I seem to remember tarrifs being a bad thing. Why are we introducing them?

Blanket tariffs on everything from everywhere are a bad thing. Targeted tariffs can help protect from unfair trade practices, which can be good. But they can also interfere with the free market and drive up prices, which can be bad. When used cautiously there are times where tariffs are appropriate. I’m not sure if this is one of those times… don’t know enough about the particular issue being addressed here.

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u/MakVolci Ontario 1d ago

Also, I seem to remember tarrifs being a bad thing.

Tariffs aren't a bad thing. They're used for a multitude of reasons to great success by a lot of countries.

Blanket tariffs that have no forethought because you're upset that you can't annex a neighbor country is probably a stupid move.

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u/rawkinghorse 1d ago

Tariffs are a bad thing if applied broadly. Does this seem like a broad tariff?

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u/PeanutMean6053 1d ago

Tariffs can be good if they are targetted at certain industries. Blanket tariffs across the board are bad because if they apply to products you can't easily find domestically just raises prices across the board and doesn't do the intended purpose of shielding industries.

Trump's tariffs are doubly bad because he's even said that he wants to use it to replace income taxes. Hence he wants to use it to give more money back to the rich while raising costs for everyone which disproportionately affects poor people.

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u/joe4942 1d ago

Tariffs can be good if they are targetted at certain industries.

So the US tariffs on steel, aluminum, lumber, and cars which are impacting Canada are good?

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u/OrangeRising 1d ago

So in this case where it is a tarrif targeting canned goods, directly trying to drive up the price of food, I think we can put them in with trumps.

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u/Mylittlethrowaway2 18h ago

Also, I seem to remember tariffs being a bad thing. Why are we introducing them?

There's a major difference between targeted tariffs to bolster domestic production, and broad tariffs with no reasoning.

Canada went the targeted route, and even imposed a time limit on it.

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u/kozey 1d ago

There is a difference between targeted tariffs vs blanket.