At one minute past midnight Tuesday, Canada began taxing American steel, cheese, appliances and farm equipment at the same rates Washington has charged Canadian goods since August 22. A few hours earlier, the President had posted that Bombardier could no longer sell planes in the United States unless it built them here. Two days before that, he’d posted a picture of himself knocking Mark Carney onto the ice, captioned “Get up, governor.” Most coverage focuses on the tariff rates. I want to look at the caption, because the Church has something precise to say about it, and Pope Leo XIV said it 4 months ago.
The News Story
Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on about $20 billion worth of American goods took effect at 12:01 a.m. ET Tuesday, September 8, 2026, hours after President Donald Trump said he would ban U.S. sales of aircraft made by Montreal-based Bombardier unless the company builds its planes in the United States.
The Canadian duties, imposed by an order in council, apply at rates of 15%, 25% or 50% to more than 700 products, the Canadian government says. They cover steel, aluminum, cheese and other dairy, household appliances, clothing, cosmetics, paper products, construction materials and farm equipment. Levies on American steel and aluminum double to 50%, matching the rate Washington charges on the same metals from Canada. Ottawa exempted American seafood from the 25% duties, sparing producers in Maine and Alaska, and paired the tariffs with a $5.42 billion support package for affected businesses and workers.
Ottawa says the measures match, dollar for dollar and rate for rate, the 50% tariffs the United States has charged on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods since August 22, the day after bilateral trade talks collapsed. The Associated Press calculated the covered goods at about 6% of the $333.6 billion the U.S. exported to Canada last year. RBC Economics said the duties were unlikely to dent overall U.S. growth but could hit particular businesses hard.
Trump’s post about Bombardier appeared on Truth Social Monday. “If they want our Market, they must build here, and stop treating America like a ‘piggybank,’” he wrote, adding that more than half the company’s revenue comes from the United States. CNN said it had asked the White House about the ban. Bombardier said it maintains a significant manufacturing presence in the U.S., “creating tens of thousands of jobs across the United States.” Flavio Volpe, president of the Canadian auto parts group APMA, said Bombardier flies GE and Honeywell engines and employs about 3,000 American workers.
The threat follows a string of U.S. moves since the talks broke down. Trump has said he will raise tariffs on Canadian vehicles, auto parts and steel to 50% on January 1, 2027. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has said Washington could ban some Canadian goods outright. Trump also signed an order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” for federal use. On Sunday, he posted an image of himself knocking Prime Minister Mark Carney down in a hockey game, captioned “Get up, governor,” and on Monday, a map of North America covered by the U.S. flag.
The two governments give different accounts of why the August talks failed. Canadian officials said American negotiators pressed for changes to French-language content rules, refused tariff exemptions for heavy trucks, and sought limits on Canada’s trade deals with other countries. Greer denied that language rules sank the deal, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick blamed last-minute Canadian requests.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has stood by the countermeasures and said he would match any further U.S. action. “When the Americans stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough and start being serious about having those discussions, we can have those discussions,” he said last week. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has said his province could restrict electricity exports to New York and Michigan. Eight of Canada’s ten provinces already restrict or ban U.S. alcohol.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on CNBC on August 31, “I don’t think you can be in a tit-for-tat with someone who’s 13 times larger than you are.” Statistics Canada reported Friday that Canada lost 42,000 jobs in August. Harvard economist Gordon Hanson said consumers are unlikely to see immediate price effects because many supply contracts are set in advance, but could see markedly higher prices by next summer. Carney addresses the European Parliament next week. The U.S. midterm elections are two months away.[1]
Catholic Social Teaching Analysis
The Line Leo XIV Drew
In Magnifica Humanitas, in the section on the common good, Leo XIV turns to international politics and writes a paragraph that could have been drafted this week. “As the divide between nations widens, a mentality of confrontation and aggression begins to take hold,” he says. Then: “the promotion of the common good can never be separated from respect for the right of peoples to exist, to preserve their own identity and to contribute their unique qualities to the family of nations.” And the last sentence of the paragraph: “any attempt or plan to eliminate or subjugate a nation is gravely immoral and therefore unacceptable.”[2]
“Gravely immoral” is about the strongest grade the Church hands out short of “intrinsically evil,” and the Holy Father chose it. So the first question is the plain one. Is anyone attempting or planning to subjugate a nation?
A tariff, by itself, is nowhere near that line. Countries raise and lower duties constantly, and the Church has never called a customs schedule a sin. Catholics can disagree in good conscience about the 50% rate on Canadian steel. But the tariffs arrive within a larger message. “Governor.” The 51st state. “Canada lives because of the United States.” A map of the continent under one flag. A demand, in the President’s own words, that Canadian jets be built “here” or not sold at all, and Carney’s summary of the American terms as industries “gradually wound down in Canada and wiped out.” Put those side by side, and you have a message about what Canada is permitted to be, and that is exactly the territory Leo XIV fenced off: a nation’s right to remain one.
Whether that message is a plan or a taunt, I can’t say. The Church’s teaching doesn’t require me to. It draws the line at the attempt, and it draws it for the strong party, because only the strong party can cross it. A country 13 times smaller than its neighbor can’t subjugate anybody. That’s why the same paragraph that names the sin also names the road to it, a “mentality of confrontation and aggression” that takes hold “as the divide between nations widens.” Bessent’s line about a tit-for-tat with someone 13 times your size is a fact about GDP. Leo XIV’s point is that the gap is where the temptation lives.
A Nation’s Right To Remain One
The Compendium fills in what “identity” means. “The field of human rights has expanded to include the rights of peoples and nations,” it says, and then, drawing on John Paul II’s 1995 address to the United Nations, it lists them. A nation has a “fundamental right to existence,” to “its own language and culture, through which a people expresses and promotes … its fundamental spiritual ‘sovereignty’,” and to “shape its life according to its own traditions.”[3]
Now look at why the talks collapsed. Canadian officials say the American side pressed for changes to the rules that keep French-language content visible on streaming platforms and on labels. Greer denies that’s what sank the deal; Lutnick says it was trucks. Take the American account at face value, and the point still stands, because the demand sat on the table long enough for Carney to call it a matter of “fundamental rights” in public. He was using the Church’s category whether he knew it or not. A people’s language is the thing through which it “expresses and promotes” its spiritual sovereignty, in the Compendium’s phrase, and a negotiator who puts it on the list of concessions has miscategorized it. You can bargain over steel. You can’t bargain over whether Quebec gets to be Quebec, any more than you could bargain over whether Nebraska gets to speak English.
What Canada May Do, And What It May Not
Canada has something real to defend, and the Church says a nation may defend it. But the same paragraph of the Compendium that lists a nation’s rights closes with its “primary duty,” which is “to live in a posture of peace, respect and solidarity with other nations.”[3] That duty doesn’t lapse because the neighbor is being a bully.
The Church also has a checklist for measures like these. Compendium 507 was written about sanctions, measures meant to correct a government’s behavior. Ottawa has told us that’s the purpose of its tariffs: Joly said the list was built to “put political pressure” on Washington. That places Canada’s measures inside the Church’s category, and the Church’s conditions follow. The purpose “must be clearly defined.” The measures must be “objectively evaluated” for “their real impact on the civilian population.” Their true objective is “negotiation and dialogue.” They “must never be used as a means for the direct punishment of an entire population.” And they must be “of limited duration.”[4]
Score Canada fairly. Dollar for dollar and rate for rate is a defined purpose, and a proportionate one. The $5.42 billion package for the businesses and workers these tariffs will hurt weighs the impact on the population in advance. Carney keeps saying talks can resume. Where Canada wobbles is on the last two conditions. Nobody in Ottawa has named a date for when these tariffs will come off. And when the industry minister says “Canada will win this trade war,” she has slipped from correction into victory, and victory over a neighbor’s population is exactly what 507 forbids. The seafood exemption says the same thing from the other end: Ottawa spared Maine and Alaska, which means it knows precisely which American families it has chosen to hit. The Church asks it to keep knowing that.
Now run Washington through the same list, because the test doesn’t care which flag flies over the customs booth. A threatened ban on an entire company’s products, an outright ban on “some Canadian goods,” and the President’s estimate that ending all trade with Canada would “save” $90 billion: none of those has a defined purpose beyond pressure, none has a duration, and the last one is the direct punishment of an entire population offered as a goal. On the Church’s checklist, the stronger party fails more conditions than the weaker one.
The Bridge Nobody Can Tariff
The Compendium’s chapter on the international community says cooperation between nations requires, “beyond the strict market mentality,” an awareness of “the duty to solidarity, justice and universal charity.”[5] Leo XIV puts it more concretely. We already live, he writes, in “a kind of ‘de facto solidarity,’ for our lives are intertwined,” and it becomes solidarity “in the fullest sense of the word” only “when it becomes a conscious choice.”[6]
Nobody has to imagine what de facto solidarity looks like here. It’s the Blue Water Bridge in the photo above and the roughly 400,000 people who crossed the border every day before this started. It’s the Ford plant in Windsor that builds engines for American-assembled trucks, engines an HEC Montréal trade economist says can’t simply be sourced from Mexico. It’s the 3,000 Americans who work for Bombardier and the GE and Honeywell engines hanging on its jets. It’s the 4 million barrels of Canadian oil a day that American refineries run on. Two countries this intertwined are one economy with two governments, and a tariff wall through the middle of it is a wall through the middle of a workshop. The Kiel Institute’s estimate that American importers and consumers absorb 96% of a tariff’s burden is a way of saying the wall lands on your side too.
This is where Leo XIV’s teaching on development bites. Development, he writes, “is not truly human if it increases consumption for some while shifting costs and burdens onto others, or relegates entire regions to subordinate roles.”[7] “Subordinate roles” is a precise description of “build here or don’t sell here.” And “shifting costs and burdens onto others” describes what both governments are now doing to their own citizens in order to hurt each other’s: 42,000 Canadian jobs gone in August, and the American price increases Gordon Hanson says will arrive by next summer once the old contracts run out.
So here’s where the Church leaves this story. Canada has a right to exist as Canada, language and all, and Leo XIV has called any plan to subjugate it gravely immoral. That line is real, and it’s aimed at the stronger party. Canada’s counter-tariffs are a legitimate defense of that right, and the Church asks Ottawa to keep them proportionate, pointed at the negotiating table, sparing of families, and temporary. And both governments answer to the same duty of solidarity, which neither invented and neither can repeal, because it was poured into the footings of the St. Clair River crossing long before either of them took office.
Pray for the families on both sides of that bridge this week. Pray for the negotiators, whenever they get back in the room. And when somebody posts a picture of a prime minister flat on the ice, remember that the Church has already graded the thing the joke is pointing at, and the grade is “gravely immoral.”
This story turns on the right of a nation to exist and to remain itself, and on the duty of solidarity that binds the stronger neighbor to the weaker one.
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Footnotes
- Rob Gillies, “What to Know About Canada’s Escalating Trade War With the US as Carney Retaliates With Tariffs,” Associated Press via ABC News, September 8, 2026, abcnews.com; Elisabeth Buchwald and John Liu, “Canada’s Retaliatory Tariffs Take Effect as Trump Threatens to Ban Bombardier Jet Sales in US,” CNN, September 7, 2026, cnn.com; “Canada’s Retaliatory Tariffs on $20bn of US Goods Take Effect,” Al Jazeera, September 8, 2026, aljazeera.com; Matthew Horwood and Omid Ghoreishi, “Trump Says He’s Banning US Sales of Products From Canada’s Bombardier,” The Epoch Times, September 7, 2026, theepochtimes.com; Sara Dorn, “Trump Threatens Ban on Canadian Plane Maker Bombardier Unless It Manufactures in U.S.,” Forbes, September 7, 2026, forbes.com; “Trump Threatens Bombardier Ban as Canada Tariff Deadline Looms,” The Christian Science Monitor, September 7, 2026, csmonitor.com; “Mark Carney Says US Must Get Serious in Canada Trade Negotiations,” Fox News, accessed September 8, 2026, foxnews.com; “US-Canada Trade Negotiations Suspended, Carney Vows Dollar-for-Dollar Retaliation Against Trump’s 50% Tariffs,” Fox Business, accessed September 8, 2026, foxbusiness.com. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2026), no. 64, vatican.va. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 157, quoting John Paul II, Address to the Fiftieth General Assembly of the United Nations, October 5, 1995. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 507. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 448. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 74. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 83. ↩
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