The trade skirmish between Washington and Ottawa that has rattled North American supply chains this year was not an accident of diplomacy, according to a commentary published in American Thinker β it was engineered. In a September 10 piece titled “A Manufactured Trade War with Canada,” trade compliance consultant John F. Di Leo argues that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney deliberately scuttled a trade agreement his own negotiators had already accepted, inviting retaliation from Washington that he then matched with tariffs of his own.
The dispute flared in August, per the commentary, when Canada withdrew from a trade agreement its negotiators had already agreed to, a move Di Leo attributes to Carney personally recalling the Canadian team in order to create a fight. The Trump administration responded with a slate of new and increased tariffs on Canadian goods, and Canada answered in kind. According to Di Leo’s figures, the two sets of measures would theoretically cover roughly $20 billion a year in goods combined.
Why the math favors Washington
Di Leo leans on trade flows to argue that the symmetry is misleading. American firms import about $400 billion in goods from Canada annually, he writes, meaning the new US tariffs touch only about 5 percent of that trade. Canadian firms, by contrast, import roughly $260 billion a year from the United States, so Ottawa’s retaliatory tariffs hit a larger share of its own imports β somewhere in the range of 7 to 8 percent.
More important, in his telling, is the underlying imbalance. Tariffs are nominally attacks on the exporting country, but the importers who pay them are the ones who feel the pain, and Canada is far more dependent on American goods than the reverse. The United States supplies somewhere between a third and a half of Canada’s global imports, a figure Di Leo uses to reach a blunt conclusion: Canada cannot win a trade war with the United States, so by entering one at all, it loses regardless of how the bargaining plays out.
That asymmetry frames the question he spends the rest of the piece trying to answer: why would Carney start this?
The political explanation
Di Leo’s answer is domestic American politics. He notes that Carney, a longtime central banker who had not been in electoral politics before being selected as prime minister last year, has brought on American Democratic activists as senior advisers β including as his chief of staff β to help design policies intended to damage President Trump and the Republican Party ahead of this fall’s midterm elections.
He also points to Carney’s first year and a half in office, during which Canada signed new agreements with mainland China that deepen its already substantial ties to the CCP economy. In Di Leo’s characterization, Carney is effectively committing Canada to serve as a willing vassal in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. He wonders aloud whether Canadian voters understood any of this when they elected Carney in 2025, noting that while the Liberals were long known for socialist domestic policy, it was not clear the public expected to get a leader who would make the Canadian economy “a subsidiary of China Inc.”
A deeper problem than tariffs
The commentary then widens its lens to the Trump administration’s broader trade and manufacturing agenda. During Trump’s first term, Di Leo writes, most observers β possibly including the president and his own appointees β assumed the West still manufactured a great deal and merely needed to reclaim its edge. Tariffs plus domestic tax and regulatory reform, the thinking went, would rebuild American production.
What has emerged more recently, in his account, is how much worse the picture is: American manufacturing has been hollowed out more severely than assumed, and conditions in some other countries are worse still. A machine built in the United States may contain parts from China, Canada, Mexico and Italy, and while Americans would like more of those parts made domestically, the same is presumably true of their trading partners. The problem is that non-Chinese parts frequently turn out to be substantially or entirely Chinese β a switch bought from China and a dial bought from Canada, only to discover the Canadian dial was molded in China and merely painted in Canada, or simply repackaged with no alteration at all.
That discovery, according to Di Leo, is what drove the current crackdown on illegal origin transshipment and this summer’s decision to move to annual reviews of the USMCA, the 2019 agreement that replaced NAFTA.
His argument is that the Trump administration is not only fighting for the American economy but for the economies of US allies “whether they like it or not” β negotiations designed to bring more manufacturing not just to the United States but to Canada, Mexico, the UK and the EU. He expresses astonishment that some of those governments are resisting, framing their posture as a preference for the status quo in which their own industrial bases keep eroding while China fills the vacuum.
China, he writes, remains a dishonest partner engaged in offenses ranging from Uyghur forced labor to currency manipulation, material dumping and intellectual property theft. He then raises a more alarming charge: that Chinese manufacturers have been caught embedding tiny remote controls β “kill switches” β in a wide array of electronic components with no plausible purpose other than the ability to disable a product an ocean away should Beijing ever choose to.
Di Leo poses the question of whether it is conspiratorial to imagine China flipping that switch during a Taiwan crisis β shutting down CNCs and molding equipment in American factories, power stations on the electric grid, dashboards in American cars, cockpits in American airplanes. Perhaps that is not the plan, he allows, but if not, why do such remote controls keep turning up in Chinese electronic components?
From policy dispute to loyalty question
The piece closes by reframing the administration’s trade efforts as something larger than protectionism β an effort to uphold the rule of law, defend national security and protect workers worldwide from Chinese tactics. That much, Di Leo insists, should by now be obvious to foreign leaders like Carney and their trade teams.
Which leads him to an unsettling possibility: that the disagreement is not merely about economic policy, but that more allied countries than expected are currently led by people who are, for all intents and purposes, agents of the People’s Republic of China.
That final claim is offered as speculation rather than documented allegation, and it caps an argument that runs from tariff arithmetic to espionage-adjacent hardware to a sweeping judgment about the loyalties of Western leaders. Whether readers accept the leap is another matter β but as a window into how one strand of American opinion is framing the Canada fight, the essay is blunt about its conclusion: the trade war, in this telling, was never really about trade.
Source: www.americanthinker.com β https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/a-manufactured-trade-war-with-canada/