Fact check: What Trump doesn’t mention about Canada’s dairy tariffs

By Daniel Dale, CNN
Published 8:00 AM EDT, Mon March 10, 2025


President Donald Trump correctly noted Friday, as he has before, that Canada has tariffs above 200% on dairy products imported from the US. But Trump again failed to mention a critical fact.

Those high tariffs kick in only after the US has hit a certain Trump-negotiated quantity of tariff-free dairy sales to Canada each year – and as the US dairy industry acknowledges, the US is not hitting its allowed zero-tariff maximum in any category of dairy product.

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Trump also made a claim that is simply false. He told reporters Friday that the situation with Canadian dairy tariffs was “well taken care of” at the time his first presidency ended, “but under Biden, they just kept raising it.”

In reality, Canada did not raise its dairy tariffs under then-President Joe Biden, as official Canadian documents show and industry groups on both sides of the border confirmed to CNN. The tariffs Trump was denouncing Friday were left in place by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, which Trump negotiated, signed in 2018 and has since touted as “the best trade deal ever made.”

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