Canada's retaliatory tariff on US Aluminum Products exports

The aluminium leg of Canada’s surtax package carries an irony that the steel leg does not: Canada is itself one of the world’s largest aluminium producers, its hydro-powered smelters in Quebec and British Columbia supplying a substantial share of the metal consumed across North America. When Ottawa applied a twenty-five percent surtax to US-origin aluminium products under Chapter 76 of the tariff schedule — primary forms under heading 7601 and the fabricated articles that follow from them — it was acting from a position of genuine strength in the very commodity it was taxing, which gave the measure a credibility that a purely defensive tariff would lack.

The aluminium surtax shared its legal vehicle and timing with the steel measure, taking effect March 13, 2025 under the same United States Surtax Order, SOR/2025-66, as the counterpart to the US Section 232 aluminium duty. But the commercial dynamics differ from steel because the cross-border aluminium trade is heavily weighted toward Canadian primary metal flowing south into US manufacturing, with US-origin aluminium moving north in smaller and more specialised volumes — rolled and extruded products, speciality alloys, and fabricated components. The surtax therefore landed on a narrower, higher-value band of US exports than the broad steel measure did.

As with steel, the August 22, 2025 amending order announced by Prime Minister Carney removed the surtax on US aluminium covered by the Canada-United-States-Mexico Agreement, effective September 1, 2025. US-origin aluminium qualifying under the agreement’s rules-of-origin returned to duty-free treatment, leaving the twenty-five percent charge on non-qualifying product — which is why this entry is recorded as superseded by a removal event. The deep integration of the North American aluminium industry, where metal and semi-fabricated forms cross the border through multiple processing stages, makes qualifying-origin determination particularly intricate for this sector.

For a US aluminium exporter, the practical priorities are to map each product against the CUSMA rules-of-origin for Chapter 76, confirm whether a given shipment qualifies before quoting a landed price, and document the determination thoroughly. Speciality and fabricated aluminium products that draw on multi-country inputs require the closest analysis, since the qualifying-origin test is where a twenty-five percent swing in cost is decided. The surviving charge on non-qualifying goods should be treated as the durable exposure rather than assuming the September rollback removed the surtax across the board.

See also: Canada tariff overview, Aluminum Products, and Canada’s full retaliation list.