Trump, Tariffs, and...Canada?

As you are probably well aware, Trump has decided to tariff many countries, weakening growth both domestically and internationally. Lawrence McKay, a political scientist, asked me to see if this was having any effect on the upcoming 2025 Canadian Election. Canada depends on American trade, exporting about three quarters of its goods there. This is not to suggest it’s an unbalanced relationship, as America also exports lots of goods to Canada.

YouGov has handily come out with an MRP on the Canadian Elections, projecting a ‘modest’ majority for the governing Liberal Party.

There also exists the IRPP study on how much Canadian Census Districts are affected by American exports.

The trend is fairly modest, a linear correlation of -0.16 with a P Value of 0.003 (rejecting the null hypothesis). This is only a weak relationship, but the data was interesting to collate nonetheless.

Broken down by industry, Steel and Iron Mills have the strongest Pearson correlation of -0.195 (P Value 0.0003). This is one of the big exports from Canada to America, so the effect here is not too unsurprising.