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In a factory in Brantford, Ontario, workers feed lengths of lumber into machines that shape, sand and paint them into one Canadian export that needs no introduction: the hockey stick. Roustan Hockey turns out about 400,000 traditional wooden sticks a year, roughly 100,000 of them bound for the United States. It is Canada's last major hockey-stick factory and, as of this week, perhaps the purest target of President Donald Trump's newest tariff.
On July 20, the White House announced 50 percent tariffs on a series of Canadian goods including wine, cement and hockey sticks, effective in 30 days. Hockey sticks featured prominently, presumably because they are to Canada what bourbon is to Kentucky: both a commodity and a national symbol.
There is just one problem. The sticks used by today's pros, and coveted by American kids whose parents pay hundreds per model, are not lengths of Canadian timber. They are carbon-composite sticks built through international supply chains centered largely in China. The tariff aimed at a Canadian icon may therefore spare most of the sticks Americans think of as Canadian, while landing squarely on the tiny factory still making the genuine article.
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This is less a trade war than a slap shot returning toward the shooter.
Common Knowledge
The administration's case begins with reciprocity. Canada, the White House says, discriminates against American cars, dairy and alcohol, and has retaliated against earlier U.S. measures rather than offer concessions. The duties were imposed under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 (a nearly century-old provision that has essentially never been used) which permits retaliation against nations judged to discriminate against American commerce. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer accused Ottawa of retaliating while Washington sought reciprocal deals. House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith said any renewed continental pact must "level the playing field" for American workers.
As usual with such tariffs, critics see a simple tax in patriotic packaging that will hurt American consumers. The libertarian Cato Institute called the use of Section 338 "the nuclear option for Trump tariffs." Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer previously dismissed the policy as "price-spiking tariff temper tantrums" paid by American households and Ontario Premier Doug Ford vowed to answer "tariff for tariff, dollar for dollar."
Uncommon Knowledge
The most important words in the tariff documents are not "hockey sticks." They are "products of Canada."
The measure imposes the duty on covered articles that are products of Canada. Boringly, ice-hockey sticks sit in tariff classification 9506.99.25. Less boringly, "Product of Canada" does not mean "owned by a Canadian company" or "shipped from Quebec." Customs law looks to where an article was made or where it last underwent substantial transformation. Repackaging or relabeling doesn't count, and Customs and Border Protection has explicitly warned against routing Chinese goods through third countries to disguise origin.
So a stick molded in China does not become Canadian because a Canadian company owns the logo. A Chinese-made Bauer or CCM would not face the new 50 percent Canadian tariff on the strength of its brand ancestry, though it could still owe duties on Chinese goods, including any relevant Section 301 measures.
The scale of that difference is considerable. Equipment tracker GearGeek records Bauer on 40.05 percent of NHL sticks and CCM on 39.13 percent, for a total of 79.18 percent, ahead of Warrior (15.94 percent), True (3.16 percent) and Sherwood (1.19 percent). Those figures track pro preference, not actual U.S. imports, but they show which names define the modern stick. When COVID shut Chinese factories in 2020, it was Bauer's and CCM's custom sticks that went dark but Warrior's kept coming from Tijuana.
The sticks most exposed to the Canadian tariff, by contrast, are the wooden ones from Brantford. No NHL player has regularly used a wooden stick in well over a decade. The most indisputably Canadian stick is also the least representative of the modern game.
That is the boomerang. A tariff symbolically aimed at a thriving Canadian industry may instead spare the expensive composites arriving from China and clobber a historic shop making a technology the NHL abandoned.
It also complicates the promise that tariffs reverse offshoring: a levy on products of Canada gives a China-based manufacturer no reason to move to the U.S., and may quietly favor Mexico, where Warrior already builds and goods can qualify under continental rules. The relative winner could be the very supply chain the announcement implicitly criticizes.
The administration may yet win concessions or, given Trump's TACO reputation, the tariff may be softened before August. None of that changes the score. Canada still owns the hockey stick in the popular imagination but China increasingly owns it on the factory floor. Trump picked up the symbol, aimed it north and swung—and the supply chain sent it back.
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