In 1911 the pressure cost a prime minister his office. In 1930 it cut trade between the two countries by 71 per cent. In 2018 it produced a dollar-for-dollar list. In 2020 Washington backed down in six weeks. The word “sorry” appears in none of them.
“They’re gonna come in and they’re gonna say, ‘Sir, we are sorry.'”
That is Donald Trump, on the twenty-eighth of September, predicting a Canadian trade deal within three or four weeks.
That is the theory. Tariffs, then bans, until Ottawa gives in and apologizes.
Has that ever happened?
The record covers a hundred and fifteen years. Four times, Washington pushed Canada hard on trade. Here is how each one ended.
1911: The Speaker Said the Quiet Part
Washington and Ottawa had negotiated a free trade deal. It was, on the numbers, a good one for Canada. It did not survive a sentence.
Arguing for it on the floor of the House of Representatives, the Speaker, Champ Clark, said:
“I look forward to the time when the American flag will fly over every square foot of British North America up to the North Pole.”
Canadians heard annexation.
The Conservatives filibustered the deal in Parliament and then fought an election against it. On the twenty-first of September, 1911, voters removed Wilfrid Laurier after fifteen years in office. Robert Borden’s Conservatives won a hundred and thirty-two seats to eighty-five, and the deal died with Laurier’s government.
The lesson of 1911 is not that Canadians dislike trade agreements. They had negotiated this one. The lesson is what happens to a trade agreement in Canada once it is framed as a question of who Canada belongs to. The economics stopped mattering. A government with fifteen years of incumbency behind it was removed inside a single campaign.
Every American administration since has had this example available to it.
1930: Smoot-Hawley, and a 71 Per Cent Collapse
By 1930, Canada was America’s largest trading partner, taking eighteen per cent of all American exports.
More than a thousand economists petitioned President Hoover to veto the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. He signed it on the seventeenth of June. It raised tariffs on more than eight hundred products, adding about twenty per cent on average to Canadian exports.
Canada did not wait for it to pass.
In May — a month before the signature — Mackenzie King imposed countervailing duties on sixteen American products, covering about thirty per cent of everything the United States sold to Canada.
It did not save him. He lost the election that summer. His successor, R.B. Bennett, raised the duties further.
Then the arithmetic:
- 1929: $1.5 billion in trade between the two countries
- 1931: $1 billion
- 1933: $440 million
A fall of seventy-one per cent.
It ended, five years later, with a reciprocal trade agreement signed by Roosevelt and King in 1935.
One detail from that episode carries directly into the present. The statute behind Smoot-Hawley was never repealed. It is the same Tariff Act now being used against Canada.
2018: “We Will Not Escalate and We Will Not Back Down”
Trump’s first term. On the thirty-first of May, twenty-five per cent on Canadian steel and ten per cent on aluminum.
Canada announced counter-tariffs the same day — sixteen point six billion Canadian dollars of American goods.
The list was the message. Not only steel and aluminum, but ketchup, yogurt, lawn mowers, motor boats, and whiskey from Tennessee and Kentucky. Products chosen for where they are made rather than what they are made of.
At the G7, Justin Trudeau said:
“As Canadians, we are polite, we’re reasonable, but also we will not be pushed around.”
Trump called him “very dishonest and weak.”
Chrystia Freeland described Canada’s list as “a dollar for dollar response,” and added: “We will not escalate and we will not back down.”
It took effect on the first of July. Canada Day.
The tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum were lifted on the seventeenth of May, 2019 — after Canada made clear they stood in the way of ratifying the new NAFTA.
Note the mechanism. The tariffs did not come off because Canada asked. They came off because Washington wanted something that Canada was in a position to withhold.
2020: Six Weeks
On the sixth of August, Trump put ten per cent back on Canadian aluminum, saying “Canada was taking advantage of us, as usual.”
The next day, Ottawa lined up three point six billion dollars in counter-tariffs.
On the fifteenth of September — the day those were due to take effect — Washington dropped its tariff.
Six weeks from imposition to removal. No apology was requested and none was offered.
Now the Part That Complicates the Pattern
Canada has given ground, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest about the record.
In the 2018 negotiation it opened fourteen categories of its dairy market to American quotas, starting at about sixteen thousand seven hundred tonnes and rising to a hundred thousand tonnes by year six. It scrapped the Class Seven milk pricing that Washington had fought.
That is a real concession, extracted under real pressure. Canada conceded on supply management, the file it had defended longest.
What it did not do was apologize, and what it got in return was a signed agreement. The concession was traded, not surrendered.
And This Time Is Heavier
The four episodes above are not a perfect guide, because the present pressure exceeds all of them.
Fifty per cent tariffs, on twenty-seven point six billion dollars of Canadian goods since the twenty-second of August — not ten per cent, not twenty-five.
Outright bans instead of taxes. Small in dollar terms, about nine hundred and sixty-seven million dollars, or zero point three per cent of what America buys from Canada. But new in kind. A tariff is a price. A ban is a refusal, and it earns nothing.
A United States that declined in July to renew the trade agreement.
And a memorandum signed on the sixteenth of September removing Canadian goods from federal procurement — access the White House itself put at over two hundred and eighty billion dollars.
No previous episode combined all four. In 1930 the instrument was a tariff schedule. In 2018 and 2020 it was a tariff on two metals. What is running now is tariffs, bans, procurement exclusion and the lapse of the agreement itself, at once.
A pattern is evidence. It is not a guarantee.
What the Record Says
Four times in a hundred and fifteen years, Washington applied serious trade pressure to Canada.
In 1911 it destroyed the agreement it was meant to secure and removed the prime minister who had negotiated it.
In 1930 it produced Canadian counter-duties before the American bill was even signed, and a seventy-one per cent collapse in trade between the two countries, resolved five years later by a reciprocal agreement.
In 2018 it produced a same-day, dollar-for-dollar retaliation list timed to take effect on Canada Day, and the tariffs came off when Washington needed something.
In 2020 it produced counter-tariffs within twenty-four hours and an American reversal within six weeks.
Canada has conceded on dairy. Canada has lost elections over trade. Canada has watched its trade with the United States fall by more than two-thirds and taken five years to rebuild it.
The apology Trump described does not appear anywhere in that record.
Pressure on a neighbour can buy a bargain. On this record, it has never bought an apology.
Sources
- Remarks by President Donald Trump, 28 September 2026
- Speech of Speaker Champ Clark, U.S. House of Representatives, 1911
- Canadian federal election results, 21 September 1911
- Tariff Act of 1930 (Smoot-Hawley), signed 17 June 1930
- Canada–United States trade figures, 1929–1933
- Canadian–American Reciprocal Trade Agreement, 1935
- Section 232 proclamations on steel and aluminum, 31 May 2018
- Department of Finance Canada countermeasures list, 1 July 2018
- Remarks of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, G7, June 2018
- Proclamation on aluminum imports, 6 August 2020, and subsequent withdrawal, September 2020
- CUSMA dairy tariff-rate quota schedules
- Presidential memorandum on federal procurement, 16 September 2026