To Put A 50 Percent Tax On Canadian Honey And Hockey Sticks, The White House Revived A 1930 Law No President Had Dared Use

WASHINGTON—At midnight on Saturday the United States imposed a 50 percent tariff on a long list of Canadian goods, drawing its authority from a section of a 1930 trade law that no president had used in the 96 years it has been on the books.

The list reads like an inventory of a general store: hockey sticks, wine, cement, honey, cut flowers, vinyl flooring, tableware, school supplies, plywood, furniture parts, cases for musical instruments, and hundreds of other items. The tariffs took effect after talks collapsed, with Prime Minister Mark Carney saying the American side asked too much and offered too little, the sticking point being duties on cars.

The law itself is the tell. Section 338 belongs to the Tariff Act of 1930, the statute of the Smoot-Hawley era that economics textbooks spend a chapter blaming for making the Depression deeper. It was reached for because the newer tools were gone: the Supreme Court struck down the administration’s emergency tariffs in February as illegal, so the government went back nearly a century to find a power a court had not yet taken away.

The target is Canada, the closest trading partner and the longer of the country’s two land borders, now described by its own prime minister as at war with the United States. Ottawa says it will match the tariffs dollar for dollar beginning September 8. The list of enemy materiel, for the moment, includes honey and cut flowers.

So the tariff takes its authority from 1930 and its target list from a garden center. On September 8 the matching begins, and two neighbors will tax each other’s hockey sticks, each in the name of winning.