Fact check: Trump keeps making stuff up about Canada

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump keeps attacking Canada with fiction instead of fact.

Throughout his on-again, off-again trade war with Canada, which has erupted again this week, Trump’s criticism of the US neighbor has been filled with lies – a remarkable variety of assertions that either wildly distort a kernel of truth or are just plain made up.

Among other things, the president has falsely claimed that the Canadian public likes the idea of becoming the 51st US state, which is overwhelmingly unpopular with the Canadian public; that Canada is one of the world’s highest-tariff countries, though it is actually low in world rankings; that Canada prohibits US banks from operating there, though more than a dozen US banks operate in Canada; that Canada doesn’t accept US agricultural exports, though Canada is the world’s second-largest purchaser of those exports; that Chinese and Russian ships are “constantly surrounding” Canada, though that never happened; and that “they don’t, essentially, have a military,” though Canada’s very-much-existent military jointly operates the North American Aerospace Defense Command with the US and fought alongside the US in Afghanistan, against ISIS in the Middle East and in various prior wars.

The US president made yet more false claims about Canada in two social media posts on Monday. He posted the day after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy flatly declared on Fox News that Canada is “a country that doesn’t have a military,” generating corrections and denunciations not only from numerous Canadians but some retired US military commanders.

Here’s a fact check of some of Trump’s Monday statements.

Canada’s unemployment rate

Trump claimed in a Monday post: “Canada’s Unemployment Rate is now at 10%, and rapidly rising.”

That is wrong on both counts.

Canada’s unemployment rate declined to 6.4% in July. That was the third consecutive month it had gone down. It was also a two-year low.

If anyone is looking to compare the Canadian unemployment rate to the US unemployment rate, which was 4.1% in July, it’s worth noting that the two countries calculate the rate slightly differently. According to figures from Canada’s federal statistical agency, using the US method would generally reduce the Canadian rate by about one percentage point.

The extent of Canada’s reliance on the US

In another Monday social media post, Trump claimed, “They feel entitled, and yet, WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US! They do 95% of their business with the U.S., with us, the exact opposite!”

There’s no doubt that the Canadian economy is heavily reliant on the US, but there’s no apparent basis for Trump’s “95%” figure. In 2025, about 72% of Canadian merchandise exports went to the US – down from about 76% in 2024 and the lowest percentage since the early 1980s. Even 72% is a very large number, of course, but it’s far from the one Trump used. And the percentage fell below 70% in the first half of 2026.

The decline has come as some Canadians have avoided buying US products in response to Trump’s rhetoric and policy toward Canada, and as Prime Minister Mark Carney has pushed to diversify Canada’s trade flows to reduce its dependence on the US.

As for “WE DON’T NEED CANADA”? The US is far less reliant on Canada than Canada is on the US, but Canada is a critical trade partner for the US, too – so far this year, its second-largest export destination and second-largest source of imports. As of June, Canada had provided about 12% of US imports and received about 14% of overall US exports in 2026, trailing only Mexico on both counts.

US reliance on Canada is greater in many states near the northern border and for certain industries and products. The two countries’ auto manufacturing is deeply intertwined; about 63% of US crude oil imports in 2025 came from Canada; so do a strong majority of its imports of aluminum and softwood lumber. Trump himself said during a telephone rally Monday evening: “You know, selfishly, we need aluminum in this country. We don’t have it. We get it all from Canada, for the most part, and we need it badly.”

Canada’s agriculture tariffs and the US trade deficit with Canada

In one of the Monday posts, Trump claimed of Canada: “Their ridiculously high tariffs on our Farmers and farm products has made life impossible for these great American Patriots, and has long created a 60 Billion Dollar Deficit between our two Countries.”

Here are four issues with that one sentence.

US agricultural trade with Canada is overwhelmingly tariff-free: The US Department of Agriculture notes on its website that “almost all” US agricultural exports to Canada face no tariffs at all; from the late 1980s to late 1990s, the USDA explains, free trade agreements “dismantled virtually all tariff and quota barriers to Canada-U.S. agricultural trade, with a few notable exceptions” on each side. According to World Trade Organization data, about 97% of US agricultural exports to Canada are duty-free.

Canada’s few high agricultural tariffs are rarely applied: Canada does have extremely high tariffs on a small number of agricultural products, notably including dairy and poultry products, that it protects from foreign competition using a system known as supply management. But the hefty tariffs are only applied after the US exports a certain maximum quantity of tariff-free products, and the US isn’t even close to filling its quota maximums on many products. For example, it filled just 22% of its milk quota over the past year, Trevor Tombe, an economics professor at the University of Calgary, noted in an email this week.

“So, it’s true to say that Canada has massive tariffs on certain types of items. But this is only true for a very small subset of agricultural products…And even among those products, we don’t typically ‘charge’ those tariffs because the US doesn’t export enough for the tariffs to kick in,” Tombe said.

The US dairy industry argues that administrative shenanigans by Canada are to blame for the US inability to fill the quotas. Whether that’s true or not, massive Canadian agricultural tariffs clearly haven’t been the cause of the US trade deficit with Canada. Actually…

The US trade deficit with Canada is driven by US imports of Canadian energy: Specifically, the US trade deficit with Canada overwhelmingly exists because the US imports a lot of discounted Canadian crude oil – 3.9 million barrels of Canadian crude per day in 2025. The US imported $111 billion worth of Canadian energy and exported $26 billion of US energy to Canada in 2025, according to the US government’s Energy Information Administration. In other words, if the US didn’t engage in energy trade with Canada, it would have a trade surplus with Canada but its refiners would miss out on cheap energy from a convenient nearby source.

The overall US trade deficit with Canada isn’t ‘$60 billion’: Trump habitually focuses on trade in goods alone – without explaining that’s what he’s doing – and ignores the services trade at which the US excels. The US goods-only deficit with Canada has sometimes exceeded $60 billion; it was about $68 billion in 2024, according to US federal figures. But the US also had a surplus of about $29 billion in services trade with Canada that year, so the overall bilateral deficit was about $38 billion. Again, that’s still substantial, but it’s substantially lower than the number the president used.

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