How Canada Inflicted Maximum Midterms Pain On Trump

A trade deal was imminent. Top negotiators from the United States and Canada were holed up in a dreary building in southwest D.C., working on the details of an agreement to finally end hostilities that had wreaked havoc on both countries’ economies and a once close diplomatic and military relationship. But then, two hours before the Aug. 22 tariff deadline, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney instructed his negotiators to walk away. That night, the U.S. responded, imposing a 50% tariff on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods like wood pulp, hockey equipment and industrial machinery.

Carney’s government had been watching the trade negotiation deadline with an eye to a different clock ticking down: two months until Trump’s constituents went to the polls. For Canadian leaders who had spent a decade testing strategies to confront an increasingly adversarial neighbor, the electoral calendar was a new source of bargaining power to explore.

For months, embassy officials in Washington had been working with analysts from the federal finance department and foreign ministry in Ottawa to scour the country’s tariff schedules to understand where changes would be felt on the midterm electoral map. Experiencing a localized hit in their states and districts, Canadian officials knew, might be the only thing that would inspire Republicans to reconsider their acceptance of Trump’s trade policies. That leverage would only intensify as Election Day approached with affordability concerns atop voters’ minds.

“We’re also targeting products that will target states in the U.S.,” Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said at a press conference in Ottawa four days after the talks collapsed. “We’re being wise and strategic to put political pressure.”

Instead of targeting the most politically potent goods that would attract headlines, and with it the ire of Trump, the Canadians looked for goods that would maximize economic pain, like building materials that would drive up housing costs. Canadian trade analysts found it in the tariff codes that distinguish forestry goods, and picked out sub-categories covering plywood, bleached paper and paperboard where the United States fails to produce enough of its own.

If any state was primed for a fight over tariffs, it was Michigan, home to one of the country’s most fiercely contested Senate races. In the summer of 2025, two entrepreneurial political consultants — one Democrat, one Republican — had joined forces to create the Michigan Trade Smart Alliance with the hopes of drafting the state’s top business groups. At the time, corporate leaders nationwide were wary of publicly challenging Trump’s policy out of a fear that they would draw his wrath. But as trade negotiators from the two countries remained deadlocked over an end to the trade war, the association’s membership began to balloon.

“Most of these companies and people that worked at them and ran them voted for President Trump, and they’d probably vote for him again,” said John Sellek, the Republican behind the trade alliance. “They understand what he’s trying to do. They just needed him and his fellow decisionmakers, including folks in Congress, to hear what they were going through in their particular struggles.”

New Canadian tariffs took effect on Sept. 8, with ramifications rippling down from the world’s longest peaceful border and across House and Senate battlegrounds. Democrats aired $72.6 million worth of ads mentioning tariffs in the general election. It informed attacks in debates at the Kansas State Fair and on Iowa Public Television and a common thread in stump speeches from Maine to Texas.

In Michigan, Republicans were already primed to rethink how they talked about trade. The Michigan alliance had been briefing the state’s Republicans with original polling data that showed Michigan voters would oppose candidates who supported tariffs. Over the closing month of the campaign, several of the party’s candidates, including Senate nominee Mike Rogers, notably adjusted their rhetoric to move away from Trump’s hard line and encourage an end to the confrontation with Canada.

“The linkage between cost of living for Americans and tariffs on the world, and specifically on Canada, broke through,” Kirsten Hillman, who served as Canada’s ambassador to Washington from 2019 to early 2026, said two days after the election. “And that is something that we have been trying as a country, not just the government, but Canadian businesses, to really get into the U.S. discourse for two years.”

Neither Sellek nor Democratic consultant Mark Fisk were experts in international commerce. But both knew Michigan well enough to recognize that Trump’s trade war, launched shortly after his return to office in 2025, would hit close to home, given Michigan’s close economic ties to the border country.

At the time, Trump and Carney were already locked in a standoff over the future of the USMCA, a successor to the North American Free Trade Agreement that had galvanized a backlash to liberalized trade policies when it was signed by the U.S., Mexico and Canada in the 1990s. In Michigan, the pact — which dropped tariff barriers and invited manufacturers to snake their supply chains across national borders — had a dramatic impact on the economy. Unions like the United Auto Workers, which believed the free-trade zone incentivized companies to move manufacturing abroad, took a strong stand against NAFTA. Support from rank-and-file union members was credited with contributing to Trump’s 2016 sweep of Rust Belt battlegrounds. He was the first Republican presidential candidate to carry Michigan in nearly three decades.

“The relationship between Michigan and Ontario specifically is an important one,” said Wayne Schmidt, a Republican who used to represent a Grand Traverse state-legislative district bordering Canada. “It’s a little disconcerting to hear some of the rhetoric that’s said. I hope that cooler heads and warmer hearts will prevail in ongoing trade discussions and realize that Canada, and specifically from Michigan, Ontario, they’re our best friends.”

Hoping to launch an aggressive public relations campaign before the midterm elections, Sellek and Fisk set out to recruit business to join their alliance, which as a nonprofit could not spend directly on campaigns but also did not have to disclose its donors. Their goal was to catch the attention of campaigns and policymakers — and give Michigan businesses a united, higher-profile platform to push back against the tariffs.

“We had a very quaint notion that we could have a discussion, raise public awareness and simply talk about the impact,” said Fisk.

Sellek and Fisk gradually enlisted partners from across the state: the Michigan Retailers Association, which represents small, independent shops and big box stores whose customers were paying more for imported goods, from back-to-school supplies to groceries. The Michigan Restaurant & Lodging Association, which had seen plummeting visits from Canadian tourists choosing to curtail American travel. Perhaps most notable of all was the presence of MichAuto, the most prominent trade organization representing the state’s auto industry, a sector that accounts for about 20% of Michigan jobs.

It was clear in spring that no easy resolution to the trade conflict was in reach. The Trump administration signaled early it wouldn’t agree to extend the expiration date for USMCA from 2036 to 2042. And by the time the July 1 deadline rolled around, Canada and Mexico weren’t shocked when the U.S. said no, initiating annual review cycles to help America squeeze more out of its partners. The White House threatened Canada with never-been-used Section 338 tariffs in late July to force Carney to make concessions on autos and address long-standing concerns about transshipment. Carney abandoned talks, claiming a litany of red flags, and explained to Canadians that Trump was treading on Canada’s sovereignty.

In June, Sellek and Fisk commissioned a poll in partnership with the respected Lansing firm EPIC-MRA that demonstrated how the tit-for-tat affecting many sectors of Michigan’s economy was viewed across the state. The consultants saw the poll’s utility not as a broad measure of public opinion but a guide to election strategy: They chose to sample likely November voters rather than the general population. Sixty-three percent of those expected to vote opposed tariffs on auto and manufacturing parts coming from Canada, the survey found. Seventy-four percent said they believed tariffs were to blame for Michiganders’ affordability problems.

After the results came back, Sellek scheduled a private call with a half-dozen fellow Republican operatives advising federal and state candidates across Michigan, most of whom had reflexively backed Trump’s trade policy at every turn. The party’s likely Senate nominee, Mike Rogers, had in 2025 accused Democrats of “fear mongering” over a tariff policy that had “put the American people back in the driver’s seat.”

In a 45-minute Zoom presentation, Sellek walked through the numbers and their obvious implication for those running campaigns that year: Forty percent of likely voters said they would be less inclined to back a candidate who supported tariffs on imported goods.

One participant, a top adviser for a Michigan Republican House member locked in a tight reelection battle, came to believe the polling showed this was a ripe opportunity to encourage his client to buck Trump and disavow the tariffs. (The consultant was granted anonymity to speak freely about internal campaign deliberations.) A Republican incumbent fighting off a Democratic challenger could score points with the critical bloc of independent voters that the party in power was already struggling to win, and the evidence laid out before his adviser could help shield that lawmaker from any blowback from the Trump administration or party leaders.

“For many candidates who I believe were on the wrong side of this issue,” Fisk said, “it became a political liability for them in a very big way.”

Just weeks after the parties picked their nominees in Michigan, the trade war turned even uglier. Talks collapsed just ahead of the Aug. 23 deadline, leading the Trump administration to turn to a nearly century-old law — one never before used — that would give the president instant authority to hit imports from Canada with a new 50% tariff. For the first time in the conflict, the new duties would be applied to goods that had been excluded from tariffs under the USMCA pact Trump had agreed to in his first term.

Since then, Canadian officials had been gaming out potential responses to the White House’s escalating trade war. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who navigated Trump’s first volley of steel and aluminum tariffs in 2018 with dollar-for-dollar retaliation, devised a plan to avoid being drawn deeper into a trade war with an economy 10 times the size of Canada’s. Foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland and chief trade negotiator Steve Verheul were inspired by Europe’s scheme of targeting politically sensitive states, compiling tariff codes to maximize local impact in the districts of Republican leaders. They were eager to draw attention to the most symbolically potent finds: Harley-Davidsons made in Speaker Paul Ryan’s Wisconsin district, whiskies and bourbons from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky. The attention-getting strategy worked, helping pressure big American businesses and Senate Republicans to advocate against tariffs.

But when Trump returned to office in 2025, reelected on a promise to wield an aggressive tariff agenda against allies to reshore manufacturing, Canada rethought its approach. The trade war suddenly was accompanied by Trump’s apparent willingness to consider a real one, with flippant talk of annexing “the 51st state” to erase an “artificially drawn” border. Each tariff threat felt more consequential — and emotional — to Canadians, and the Ottawa consensus circled around the idea that the country’s leaders should be ready to endure short-term pain if necessary to support a more combative and aggressive approach toward Trump.

Trudeau was replaced in March 2025 by Carney, a former central banker whose track record during the Great Recession helped define him as a credible crisis manager. Carney committed to the policy of using retaliatory tariffs as a geopolitical and trade policy tool to keep Trump in check. But by the end of 2025, that approach had failed to deliver a détente, so Carney changed tactics.

When the U.S. Supreme Court in February struck down Trump’s sweeping tariffs, Carney reoriented his government toward a new set of challenges. Days earlier, he brought in Janice Charette, a former diplomat and hard-nosed top bureaucrat, to go head to head with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on the technical side of trade negotiations. He convinced Mark Wiseman, a friend and former BlackRock executive, to become the country’s new ambassador to Washington. Carney also hired Maia Johnson, an American political operative who had worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and Mike Bloomberg’s Hawkfish data operation, into a new Ottawa-based job officially labeled “Senior Advisor, United States Stakeholder Strategy.” (She now oversees operations in the prime minister’s office as well.)

At the same time, trade analysts in Ottawa and Washington got to work on a series of contingency plans, believing time would be on Canada’s side in an election year.

When Trump launched strikes on Iran at the end of February — and it became clear the ensuing conflict would not quickly resolve itself — Canadian officials realized that the increasingly dire price-sensitivity of American voters presented fresh leverage they could use.

When trade talks collapsed in late August, Canada was ready with a list of tariff codes — and the places where U.S. voters were likely to feel them. They were timed to take effect in early September, just as the fall campaign season was to begin. It was, Joly said, “the right thing to do right now.”

The admission incensed Pete Hoekstra, a Michigander who had served as a furniture executive and represented the state in Congress before being appointed Trump’s ambassador to Canada. He lashed out at Joly, accusing her of election interference, a new version of a charge that had been previously mounted by White House trade adviser Peter Navarro. Despite the public outrage that Canadian tariffs amounted to election-meddling in Republican-held states, the U.S. government never officially relayed the concern to her office, according to Joly.

“I and others in the government would never do it, because we would expect that on the American front, they would not do it to us,” said Joly, who never again described “political pressure” as an element of the Canadian strategy following the August press conference.

The first billboards had gone up early in the summer, in a handful of locations across the mitten-shaped state, putting opinions right back in drivers’ faces: 74% of Michiganders say Federal Tariffs Fuel Inflation, read one near a highway exchange in Lansing, the capital.

Their placement was strategic, going up in Michigan’s 4th, 7th and 10th Congressional Districts — all occupied by vulnerable Republicans. In August, the group began buying digital ads featuring testimonials from local workers and business owners bemoaning higher costs they warned would be felt by voters.

By October, the economic hardship that Canadian officials had anticipated was rippling throughout the American political map. Republicans worked to distance themselves from Trump on trade, some breaking with him rhetorically for the first time and putting public pressure on the administration to retreat. Maine Sen. Susan Collins, long one of the few Republicans to vote against Trump’s tariffs, bragged in a debate with Democrat Troy Jackson that she had secured an exemption for road salt. In Kansas, Sens. Jerry Moran and Roger Marshall scrambled to prevent the president from taking any targeted action against Bombardier, a Canadian aerospace manufacturer that employs roughly 1,500 people in Wichita.

In Michigan, Republicans in competitive races were all backing away from Trump, too. Rep. John James, the party’s nominee for governor, said he had implored Greer to quickly end the trade war and in October introduced a bill that would redirect a portion of tariff revenue to businesses that could show they had been harmed. (The bill did not go anywhere.) Michael Bouchard Jr., a first-time congressional candidate in the Detroit suburbs, said, “I don’t think our trade conflict with Canada is where we should be focusing a lot of our effort."

Sellek and Fisk saw an opening to push trade to the center of a Senate race that Rogers and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed had waged largely around the candidates’ backgrounds and affiliations, and issues related to Israel and national security. The Michigan Smart Trade Alliance’s business members were ready to be more emboldened in their willingness to win media attention, including through stunts. In early October, the group placed a billboard outside a debate in Grand Rapids to show how much the trade war was costing the state.

“$26 billion and counting…” it read. “MICHIGAN PAYS MORE.”

Rogers was already there. A day earlier, he had released a new ad showing him sitting at a bar, with an open bottle of Labatt Blue, the pale lager brewed in Canada that had won a cult following among American hockey fans.

“Here in Michigan we know that Canada is not our enemy,” Rogers said. “We need to end this tariff war now.”