The Shot Across the Border
On a Friday morning in late January 2025, President Donald Trump stood before reporters and announced a 25 per cent tariff on all imports from Canada and Mexico, affecting thousands of products across dozens of industries . The justification, he said, was border security—specifically, the flow of fentanyl and undocumented migrants. The mechanism was a rarely invoked executive power. The effect was immediate: a shudder through supply chains that had, for three decades, operated on the assumption that North America was a single economic space.