Canada has a One Month Reprieve on US Tariffs. What Should Agri-food do with it?

Feb 12, 2025

In dramatic fashion, the US announced tariffs of 25 percent on Canada (10 percent on energy resources) on February 1st , 2025 to come in force February 4th; by late evening of February 1st Canada announced that it was preparing to retaliate against the US with 25 percent tariffs on an initial list of products on February 4th, with a longer list to come later in the month.

Calls between President Trump and Mexican President Sheinbaum, and later between President Trump and Prime Minister Trudeau on February 3rd , have generated a reprieve of 30 days for both countries as the US considers progress on issues triggering the tariff threat- border security and fentanyl. But what is the value of this reprieve? Is it only to forestall the implementation of the US tariffs that are inevitable? Will the threat of tariffs on Canada be credibly removed, if Canada has satisfied the US concerns?

What other possibilities exist for Canada-US trade relations in 30 days’ time? This advisory note considers what could occur following the month’s reprieve, and how the Canadian agri-food sector could use this time. What are the US Objectives? Without a clear understanding of US objectives relative to tariffs with Canada, the thirty-day reprieve really just places Canada in limbo. The rationale for the reprieve is to examine compliance with, or satisfaction of, US concerns with its northern border.

It is possible that, provided that Canada has demonstrated adequate response and adjustment to US requests, the tariffs could be taken off the table, and removed from further discussion. Or the tariff possibility could remain, pending periodic or ongoing performance monitoring of the border measures.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids