We've done it, America! We've officially made Canada angry — something that even 33 years of American dominance in professional hockey hasn't been able to accomplish. 

Is this the "winning" MAGA promised us? 

Obsessively driven by the irrelevant fact that Americans purchase more useful things from Canada than the other way around, the Trump administration has once again ratcheted up the trade war with our northern neighbor. 

Announced last month, the administration's new 50 percent tariffs on certain Canadian products will affect about $20 billion worth of goods, including textiles, alcohol, lumber, Christmas ornaments, flags and even hockey sticks — because, obviously, the primary concern among the American public is the proliferation of Canadian-made sports equipment, right?

The new tariffs are much like the old ones: complex, arbitrary, prone to political favoritism and possibly illegal. And even if the courts don't intervene, it's unclear how long the tariffs might actually stay in place. As with the tariffs that have come before them, much of their staying power depends largely on the mood of the president when he logs on to Truth Social. 

However, that uncertainty is almost as bad as the economic illiteracy driving his desire to tear up previously negotiated trade deals and tax Americans into economic isolation. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rightly noted, part of the frustration with President Donald Trump's economic mismanagement is the fact that his signature on any "deal" is seemingly "written in pencil," prone to unreasonable alterations at any given moment. 

No wonder Canada has grown a bit perturbed and decided to retaliate with its own slew of tariffs, restrictions and trade limits. 

After all, fair is fair, right? And what's "fairer" than a tit-for-tat retaliatory tax policy on imports? Sure, this probably wasn't what Vice President J.D. Vance had in mind when he bemoaned Canada's lack of "fairness" in trade negotiations, but it was a pretty predictable consequence of capriciously levying taxes on imports from one of our largest and most important trading partners. 

To be sure, in the same way Trump's tariffs hurt American consumers and businesses, Canada's tariffs will also hurt Canadians. But as American producers find fewer customers north of the border who are willing to endure the cost of Canada's retaliatory import taxes, the pain will undoubtedly trickle south to American workers as well. 

For places such as Las Vegas, where Canadian tourists are a large part of what keeps our primary industry humming along, the animosity and economic friction generated by this open trade war is already having an impact. 

And why are we enduring such pain? Ostensibly, it is to "fix" a trade deficit. 

If only Trump cared as much about budget deficits as he does about the trade deficits we have with our northern neighbor, maybe our nation wouldn't be $40 trillion in debt at the moment — but that's probably a rant for another time. 

On Truth Social, Trump alleged that America "lost" roughly $60 billion a year to Canada. But that claim merely represents the president's cartoonish misunderstanding of basic economics. 

We didn't "lose" any money to Canada. It's not as if we piled up a bunch of cash on some barge and let it drift carelessly across Lake Ontario until a bunch of Canucks snagged it without permission. Instead, American businesses, consumers and manufacturers purchased things from Canada with that money. 

The $5.1 billion spent on Canadian lumber in 2025, for example, represents the raw materials needed to create many times more that dollar amount of American homes and "American Made" products. We didn't merely get lumber for that price; we received billions of dollars' worth of raw construction materials that we then used to sell more goods and make even more money for American workers and businesses.

So, no, we aren't "losing" money to Canada. Instead, we're receiving more from them in terms of products and services than they are from us — which should be considered a massive win if you're an American consumer who happens to like low prices and abundant choices when it comes to construction materials, Christmas ornaments or any other number of goods and services offered by the folks up north.  

And the trade war created by this basic economic misunderstanding in Trump's White House is going to risk an even bigger problem for Americans: At some point, if America continues to be such an undependable, unpredictable and erratically mean-spirited trading partner, the rest of the world is going to figure out how to live without us.

Canada, for example, is already looking to coordinate more closely with Europe and has already started to strengthen its relationship with China — two maneuvers intended to partially supplant its relationship with much of the U.S. 

Indeed, Vance recently complained about Canada's outreach to the People's Republic of China as evidence that the nation doesn't negotiate in good faith with the United States. But maybe, just maybe, this administration should reflect on what it means when a quasi-communist dictatorship is apparently offering more palatable trade agreements than the supposed "leader of the free world." 

Since "Liberation Day," the Trump administration has made it clear that America's official trade policy is to tax itself into economic exile. Beyond merely being an untenable way of generating prosperity, such a policy is also inherently guaranteed to reduce our standing in a world that has become more interconnected than at any other time in human history. 

Maybe America is perfectly capable of drinking its own whiskey or cutting down enough of its own trees to get along fine without buying Canadian lumber — but artificially inciting a trade war with one of our largest and closest trade partners isn't "the art of the deal" or some 4-D chess move that will magically enrich the lives of Americans. Instead, it's the natural consequences of letting a petulant wannabe robber baron try to bully the world back into some sort of protectionist 19th century Gilded Age.

And such consequences are clearly not shaping up to be a "win" by any metric, regardless of where we decide to buy our hockey sticks. 

Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas and founder of Schaus Creative LLC, an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him on Twitter @schausmichael or on Substack @creativediscourse.