The White House on Monday announced 50% tariffs effective in 30 days “on a series of Canadian goods,” including hockey sticks, but the new taxes may miss the intended target, according to NEWSWEEK. Hockey sticks are mentioned prominently in the tariffs “presumably because they are … both a commodity and a national symbol” to Canada. However, sticks currently used by pros and youth players today are “built through international supply chains centered largely in China.” The tariff therefore “spare most of the sticks Americans think of as Canadian,” while landing mostly on small factories. Rouston Hockey is Canada’s “last major hockey-stick factory,” generating 400,000 wooden sticks annually. That means that a tariff “symbolically aimed at a thriving Canadian industry may instead spare the expensive composites arriving from China and clobber a historic shop making a technology the NHL abandoned” (NEWSWEEK, 7/20).
New tariffs on Canadian hockey sticks may miss intended target
