Canada Could Eliminate Nearly 18% of All Active Tariffs — At a Cost of 1 Million USD Per Year

A quick follow-up to my piece proposing Tariff Cuts.

To give you an idea of how little revenue some tariffs collect, I thought I’d post a list of the lowest revenue generating tariffs. I took data from 2017, and carved out revenue generated from products that come from countries we’ve signed a trade deal with (since we’ll be losing the revenue from imports from products from CPTPP, CETA, etc. countries).

Once we do that, we find a whole bunch of tariff items (by HS6 code) that generate very little revenue. 17 of them each raised less than 10 USD!

These are some pretty obvious candidates for cuts. The government might want to take a more surgical approach and leave a few of these on the books (I spot a few automotive tariffs on there). So take out some of these, maybe we get the figure down to $1 million.

We can significantly reduce red tape for SMEs at almost no cost to the government. This is the ultimate of no-brainers.

Here’s the list: