On: US-Canada trade war escalates as Trump threatens tariff hike on vehicles

25 August 2026

I have read that the talk now turns to carriages - that a tariff is to be laid upon vehicles crossing a border, and that the man who governs Canada will not sit at the table again until the other comes with what he calls “the right attitude.”

I must tell you what strikes me first, and it is not the diplomacy. It is the assembly line. A tariff on vehicles is not an abstraction; it is a wage. Every carriage built depends on parts crossing that border two, three times before it rolls complete, and every crossing now carries a tax. The man tightening the screw does not feel it turn. The machinist in Windsor feels it in his Friday envelope. So does his wife, who has already begun pricing the winter coat she must postpone.

You will say this is leverage - that one must squeeze before one can bargain. Perhaps. But I observe that no one doing the squeezing has recently stood in a kitchen where the arithmetic has changed mid-year. Leverage is a word for men in conference rooms. For households it is called uncertainty, and uncertainty is paid for by whoever cannot wait out the negotiation.

And I note something else: they speak of industries as though industries had no people inside them. An auto industry “destroyed” or “protected” - but within it are thousands of persons whose skill took years to build and whose mortgage does not pause while ministers posture. The rhetoric of nations is large; the ledger of families is small and exact, and only one of these ledgers appears in the reports.

If this continues, the talks resume when pride permits, the tariffs stay until then, and the cost lands precisely where it always lands - below the level where decisions are made. That is not strategy. It is simply who is not in the room.