How they just DON’T get it! The following three articles all commit the same blunder, claiming that new retaliatory tariffs imposed by Canada on toilet paper will increase the cost of toilet paper for Americans. Canadian tariffs on US toilet paper do NOT raise prices for Americans! They raise them for CANADIANS.
Now, I wouldn’t expect the average reader to get this, which is why I write about it; but I certainly do expect most financial writers to get it; but they clearly don’t even after years of Trump Trade Wars. They’ve had plenty of time to figure it out.
If you read this article and are an American, you will come to know, if you don’t already, that you don’t need to rush to the store to buy toilet paper before the price shoots up…. WELL, EXCEPT FOR THE FACT that the dumb mainstream media may have just CREATED a completely unnecessary rush to hoard toilet paper because it has no apparent knowledge of how tariffs work; so, let me help because that is what I’m here for.
The only way that Canada could raise the price of toilet paper for Americans would be if it placed export tariffs on its own manufacturers, but that is not what any of these articles claim Canada is doing. They are all about tariffs placed by Canada on US-manufactured goods. Canada can ONLY tax US goods coming INTO Canada. The damage to the US by these retaliatory tariffs is not higher prices paid by Americans but loss of business by US manufacturers who lose sales to Canada because the Canadian tariffs raise the price of their goods FOR CANADIANS so that Canadian are much less inclined to buy US toilet paper. Yet, all of the articles claim Canada’s retaliatory tariffs will raise the price of toilet paper for Americans!
Here are the errant stories:
Wiped out: US faces surging toilet paper prices amid trade war with Canada
On a roll: Canada trade war could hike toilet paper costs for Americans
Flush with tariffs: US-Canada trade war could make toilet paper costlier
All totally untrue in claiming the cost of Canada’s new retaliatory tariffs will be paid by Americans
AI just as dumb
I supposed I have to excuse to some extent the financial media in America because even AI was too dumb to get it. However, AI learns by what it reads from us, so “garbage in / garbage out,” as they say. When I asked Google’s AI search assistant “Is Canada placing EXPORT tariffs on toilet paper?” I got the following answer:
Yes, Canada is imposing tariffs on toilet paper, with rates expected to be between 25% to 50% starting in September 2026, in response to U.S. tariffs….
It just assumed that the tariffs were export tariffs or that all tariffs are the same and then made the following claim:
The tariffs on toilet paper are part of a larger trade dispute between the U.S. and Canada. The U.S. has already implemented significant tariffs on various Canadian products, prompting Canada to retaliate…. The introduction of these [Canadian retaliatory] tariffs is expected to increase the cost of toilet paper for consumers in the U.S.”
Baloney! AI likely came to that conclusion because it took at face value everything it was reading in the brain-lame American media. That, or its own logic is lacking. (I’ll actually have AI prove to you that it doesn’t even know what it is saying after I state my own claim.)
There are only two ways tariffs could raise the cost of toilet paper FOR AMERICANS. One would be if the US places tariffs on Canadian toilet paper coming into America OR on the timber from Canada that comes into America that is used in the US to manufacture toilet paper. The other would be if Canada placed export tariffs on its own products going to America. Neither of those was what happened here.
To prove how confused AI even gets on the question of tariffs, look at its own internal contradiction, which proves its original answer did not know what it was talking about:
“Canada is imposing retaliatory tariffs of between 25% and 50% on toilet paper exported to the U.S. This is in response to the U.S. implementing a 50% tariff on Canadian goods.”
Pretty clear: They are imposing an export tariff on their own toilet paper that ships to the US, EXCEPT, right after that, the AI search assistant writes:
“Canada is not placing export tariffs on its own toilet paper. Instead, it is imposing retaliatory tariffs on toilet paper imported from the U.S. These tariffs are a response to the U.S. implementing a 50% tariff on various Canadian goods…. In summary, Canada is retaliating against U.S. tariffs by imposing tariffs on U.S. imports, not on its own exports.”
So, the same AI says both that Canada is imposing tariffs on its exports of toilet paper to the US and that it is NOT imposing tariffs on its exports! Ring the dumb bell!
To get the facts straight: Canadian import tariffs are what Canada is actually imposing in retaliation for US import tariffs. Those are charged when the product from the US crosses the border into Canada, and they are charged against the Canadian importer, whoever that may be. Then they typically become part of the cost of goods sold that the importer passes on to Canadian consumers with a markup, meaning the tariff may even cost the consumer more than the tariff cost the importer in cases where it gets included in the markup. It doesn’t have to be included in the markup, but it sometimes is.
Canadians will be paying more for toilet paper because of Prime Minister Carney’s new retaliatory tariffs. However, thanks to all these dumbbell articles in the mainstream press, many Americans may rush out to beat the imagined soaring prices, which could cause sudden shortages on the shelves that raise prices in America, too! So, thanks to the mainstream press, you might not be safe from those higher prices unless most Americans are smart enough to not believe everything they read. (Highly doubtful unless it says what they don’t want to believe anyway.)
Thank you to the few extra people who clicked the “like” button (the heart near the top of the page) on the last article. If everyone reading an article that they actually like would be so kind as to click that button from now on, I’ve learned it actually may help my site succeed—not because others will say, “Oh, that was popular, so I’ll read it,” but because Substack appears to use that metric in deciding what articles to promote to other readers who are not subscribers on this site, and those promotions can go out to a lot of other Substack readers who have never heard of me. (I, of course, would not ask you to click the like button if you don’t actually like the article.)
So, anytime you actually do like an article, please do me the favor of clicking the little heart. Maybe Substack will FINALLY start sharing some of my articles outside of my own subscriber circle, which I haven’t seen it do. (My articles do get shared by other sites that read here and pick up the occasional article or that have decided to recommend my site, but they don’t go out in the once-a-week lists of “articles you may be interested in” put out by Substack … not that I’ve seen anyway. I notice ALL of those article have a LOT of “likes,” which are different than “shares.”
