Trump cut 50% tariffs on 22 Canadian goods. A Maine senator got most of the breaks

22.

That is how many kinds of Canadian goods just lost their extra 50% US tariff. President Trump signed the order on 23 October 2026. It takes effect on 30 October.

On the same day, about 100 other Canadian products got added to that same 50% tariff list for the first time. Nothing about this trade fight actually got smaller. It just moved.

The goods coming off include plywood, shipping boxes, farm machinery and edible seaweed. The goods going on include shampoo, carpets, cocoa powder and air conditioners. One of the loudest voices behind the change was a Republican senator from Maine fighting for her political life.

What exactly comes off the 50% tariff on October 30?

The 22 categories losing their tariff are mostly things American farmers and factories need from Canada and cannot easily buy anywhere else. Seven kinds of plywood are on the list. So are corrugated cardboard boxes, plastic crates, refrigeration units, and the machines that clean, sort and pack fruit and vegetables.

Fresh and dried edible seaweed is also coming off the list, a detail that matters to Maine's food industry more than most people would guess.

For every one of these goods, the tariff does not just shrink. It goes back to the normal trade rate under the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which for most qualifying goods is zero percent. That is the headline number behind the relief: 22 product lines moving from a 50% tax straight down to no tax at all, starting 30 October 2026.

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Here is the full line-by-line table, so any single row can be checked against its own source.

What got taxed instead?

Almost 100 new Canadian product categories join the 50% tariff list on the same day the old ones leave it. Cocoa powder, shampoo, soap, paint, vinyl flooring, carpets and wooden coffins are on the new list. So are window air conditioners, chest freezers, power tools and even canoes.

None of these are small items in a typical household budget. Flooring, paint and air conditioners are exactly the things people buy when they renovate a kitchen or fix up a home before selling it. A 50% tax on Canadian versions of those goods pushes buyers toward pricier US brands or a higher bill either way.

Why did a Maine senator get most of the exemptions?

This is the part that turns relief into suspicion. Senator Susan Collins of Maine is in a tough re-election fight, and the products coming off the tariff list map closely onto what her state's farmers and growers actually import from Canada.

Collins said many Maine growers rely on Canadian packaging and equipment that "is either unavailable from American suppliers or cannot be replaced without incurring significant expense." Her office named blueberry, potato, apple and seaweed producers as the groups she pushed to protect.

The timing lines up with the US midterm elections. The Wall Street Journal first reported that the rollback was designed to help Republican candidates, Collins among them, before voters go to the polls. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat, called it "Trump's desperate, 11th-hour attempt to save Susan Collins' political career."

Trump himself framed it differently. He said Washington "has all the cards" in the broader negotiation with Canada and that a wider deal is "very close."

Photo: Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

What did eight months of 50% tariffs actually cost?

The tariffs being adjusted this week go back to 20 July 2026, when Trump signed three proclamations under a rarely used law called Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930. It was the first time any US president had used that law for tariffs this large.

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Those three proclamations covered about $20 billion of Canadian goods a year, close to 5% of everything the US imports from Canada. Wine, cheese, maple syrup, hockey sticks, cement and plywood were on the original list.

Canada hit back. Starting 8 September 2026, Canadian tariffs of 15% to 50% landed on US steel, dairy, appliances, farm equipment, paper and electronics. Canada also set aside about 5.4 billion US dollars to support its own workers and businesses through the fight.

A separate, older US tariff on Canadian softwood lumber tells a similar story about who pays. That duty was cut from 45.16% to 34.75% in mid-October 2026, and the US Congress Joint Economic Committee has estimated that tariffs on building materials like lumber can add roughly $10,900 to the cost of building a new home. On a typical mortgage, that stacks on top of what a $300,000 home loan already costs in interest alone. A September poll found 65% of Americans blame Trump's own policies for high prices, around the same time home insurance bills were already hitting record highs without a single storm to blame.

Photo: James R. Tourtellotte / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

This is not the only trade story shaping prices at the moment either. Trump's government has also been striking deals far from Canada, including a Russian diesel arrangement that drew its own round of questions about who it actually helps.

Does Canada think this fight is actually over?

Not yet. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada is ready to finish a wider deal "this afternoon if the U.S. were there," suggesting Washington, not Ottawa, is holding things up.

Canada's trade minister Dominic LeBlanc said his office will "assess the latest tariff measures" and keep pushing for what his statement called a "more mutually beneficial trading relationship." That is diplomatic language for one plain fact: Ottawa is still waiting to see if this is a real olive branch or a one-week election trick.

So who actually won this round?

Twenty-two product lines got cheaper. About a hundred got more expensive. The sectors that won, blueberries, potatoes, seaweed, plywood, happen to sit in one politically pivotal state ahead of one closely watched election.

Nobody knows yet whether the prices that rose over the past eight months will actually come back down for shoppers, or whether stores just quietly keep the higher price now that shelves are already marked. The next real test lands the same week the tariffs change, when American voters head to the polls.