Carney tightens screws on steel import quota

Eli Rodney
July 17, 2025
Trade+1 more

Trump’s 50% steel tariffs are having their intended impact, shutting Canadian producers out of the market and forcing Carney to tighten the screws on previously announced measures to curb anti-competitive dumping.

Over 50% of the Canadian market is serviced by imported steel. And a lot of that imported steel is coming in at pretty low pricing. We believe there’s a significant amount of it that is unfairly traded into Canada.

Michael Garcia (CEO) - ASTL Q1’25 call

The new measures will cap non-U.S. countries with/without free trade agreements to 100%/50% of 2024 import volumes before hitting them with a 50% tariff. Taking import volumes from countries without trade deals (highlighted in red)…

… and assuming 50% of RoW volumes lack one too, this move should effectively take ~1.5M tonnes of cheap steel out of the market (nearly 20% of imports). Let’s see if that’s enough.

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