Even though the tariffs imposed by the US on its trading partners has been something of an off-and-on event, they are starting to have an impact on Canada’s trading relationships.
We have just seen numbers for June on trade, so they are tracking activity prior to the August 1 deadline that had been set to reach an agreement with the US, but some trends are emerging.
On the surface, it seemed like our two-way trade with the US went up in that month but a little deeper analysis shows some cracks. First of all, increases in export values are the result of higher prices, not more volume. And on the import side, there was one major purchase of expensive oil field equipment that skewed the numbers. Without that one transaction, imports would be down.
If you look beyond the month – which incidentally was quite a bit lower than June of last year – and look at the first half of the year, our exports, after adjusting for inflation, were down more than 30-percent compared to last year.
