What the August 2026 tariff escalation reveals about measuring PR success.
Three in four Canadians back Carney’s decision to walk away from the recent trade talks. A clear majority of Americans say the tariffs that triggered the walkout should never have been imposed on Canada in the first place.
This isn’t a battle between two populations with opposing views. It’s a case study in what happens when one government’s messaging aligns with public sentiment on both sides of the border, while the other’s resonates with neither.
The more useful question isn’t who is right. It’s who is being heard and understood.
The numbers, stated plainly
The United States imposed an additional 50 per cent duty on Canadian dairy, alcohol and motor vehicles effective August 22, invoking Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a Depression-era provision that had never before been used to impose tariffs. The measure covers roughly US$20 billion of goods, about five per cent of everything Canada ships south. Talks had been extended three days past the original August 19 deadline. They collapsed on the Friday night.
Canada answered on August 25 with countermeasures on C$27.6 billion of American goods, roughly 700 products at 15, 25 and 50 per cent tariff rates, effective September 8, alongside a C$7.5 billion support package for affected workers and businesses.
So what did the polls say?
Angus Reid surveyed 1,468 Canadians on August 22 and 23. Seventy-six per cent said Canada was right to refuse the American terms and end negotiations. Thirteen per cent said the government was wrong. Support remained at majority levels in every province, with even the lowest support reaching 65 per cent in Saskatchewan and 67 per cent in Alberta.
Fifty-three per cent of people who voted Conservative in 2025 agreed with the decision. Sixty-two per cent called the counter-tariffs proportionate.
A separate Leger survey of 1,622 Canadians, fielded August 15 to 17, found 56 per cent favoured holding the line with no further concessions.
The American picture comes from an Angus Reid survey of 1,000 US respondents fielded July 31 to August 5: Americans oppose tariffs on Canada by 59 per cent to 24 per cent, and 79 per cent hold a favourable view of Canadians. An earlier reading in March found that even among self-identified MAGA Republicans, a majority viewed Canada favourably.
Americans are divided over tariffs in general. But when it comes to tariffs on Canada specifically, the picture is much clearer.
One more figure for context. Reuters and Ipsos, polling 1,215 Americans from August 21 to 24, put presidential approval at 33 per cent against 65 per cent disapproval, the lowest level recorded in either term.
The same survey found 31 per cent support for US military action in Iran. Inflation, the conflict and the Epstein files are having a greater impact on Trump’s approval ratings than the trade dispute. The tariffs didn’t create the problem, they added another front to an already challenging political landscape.
The scoreboard problem
Here’s where much of the commentary misses the point: it treats the dispute like a contest with a single scorecard and assumes there must be a winner.
That is the wrong way to measure it. The two governments are communicating to different audiences and pursuing different objectives, so their success has to be measured differently. Look at four separate measures, and the picture becomes much clearer.
Audience. Ottawa’s messaging is aimed at two audiences at once: Canadians at home and Americans in states that could feel the impact of Canada’s retaliation. Last year the federal government bought billboards in twelve mostly Republican states reading that tariffs are a tax on your grocery bill, paid for and identified as such by the Government of Canada.
The contrast is strategic. Ottawa is fighting a two-front communications battle, reassuring Canadians while making the economic and political costs of retaliation visible to Americans. Washington, by contrast, is speaking primarily to its domestic political coalition. It isn’t trying to win over Canadians or the wider world; it is playing to the home crowd.
Discipline. Ottawa held one line. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said the United States asked too much of Canada and offered too little in return. Then, from the same podium, cam the message "We chose Canada." Dominic LeBlanc also made clear that the government had deliberately decided months earlier not to respond to Trump’s daily social media posts. Even Doug Ford, historically one of the least predictable voices on the file, aligned with that approach. That level of coordination between the federal government and a provincial premier is unusual and strategically significant.
Channel. The American position is harder to reconcile because it is being presented in two different places, with two different messages. The formal White House fact sheet makes a specific case, arguing that Canada discriminates against American dairy, alcohol and autos, while exempting critical minerals, energy and potash. But the president’s own public messaging tells a different story: a Truth Social post raising auto and steel tariffs to 50 per cent from January 1 and declaring that Canada will no longer be treated as a separate country, but as a U.S. state. A day later, that was followed by a stated intention to give “serious consideration” to renaming Lake Ontario. When two channels send conflicting messages, the informal one usually wins the headlines and the formal one gets ignored.
Durability. This is the measure few people check in week one, but it is the one that ultimately determines what survives.
The receipts
Statistics Canada recorded a 25.4 per cent drop in Canadian-resident return trips from the United States across 2025, an eleven-month streak of year-over-year declines that the agency described as the deepest and most sustained on record outside the pandemic era.
The decline did not stop when the news cycle did. February 2026 air trips were down 17.6 per cent against the previous year. Research out of the University of Toronto using cellphone location data suggested the real figure is closer to 42 per cent.
American spirits producers offer the clearest and most compelling version of the same story. According to the Distilled Spirits Council's 2025 export report, exports to Canada fell by roughly two thirds to US$89 million, moving Canada from the second-largest market for American spirits to sixth.
The second quarter of 2025 alone was down 85 per cent. Meanwhile the LCBO reported Canadian-made product sales up 18 per cent year over year, with red wine up 53 per cent.
Ford has made clear that this is not a short-term position, it's a sustained strategy. American alcohol goes back on shelves when the tariffs come off, and not before.
That is the reputational finding beneath the political one: consumers changed their behaviour, kept changing it after the initial dispute faded, and eventually turned that shift into permanent shelf space for someone else. Winning the political argument is one thing. Winning those customers back is a much slower and harder problem.
What the Public Is Saying
Listen to the language people are using, and the message is pretty clear: one side has the edge.
"Elbows up" traces to Gordie Howe, whose Saskatoon statue captures the stance, and entered political circulation when Mike Myers made the gesture in a “Canada Is Not For Sale” shirt on Saturday Night Live in March 2025. CBC’s history of “Elbows Up”
Then came “Buy Canadian,” the hat, the empty bourbon shelf, the provincial liquor board as a symbol of sovereignty. These aren’t policy arguments. They’re objects, images and gestures and that’s exactly why they stick, spread and travel.
Social media sentiment is a signal, not a scientific measure, and it should be treated accordingly. But the direction is clear and it broadly mirrors what the polling is showing.
Canadian discussion is increasingly centred on sovereignty and defiance, alongside a growing undercurrent of economic anxiety, especially in autos, lumber and steel. Two in five Canadians in the Angus Reid sample expressed concern about their own jobs. American discussion is splitting three ways: a core that sees the tariffs as overdue reciprocity; a much larger group worried about rising prices; and a persistent current of sympathy that keeps coming back to the strength and longevity of the Canada-U.S. relationship.
Canada’s domestic critics are challenging the government from within that same frame, rather than rejecting it outright.
Pierre Poilievre's line on the Prime Minister last summer was that "his elbows have mysteriously gone missing," an attack that works because the underlying narrative is already understood. After the collapse he called for Parliament to be recalled and the rejected deal published. The disagreement is real. But even the criticism is largely playing out on terms the government has already established.
The Canadian Chamber of Commerce called the tariffs "a body blow to North American competitiveness" and warned they would raise costs for Americans too. American trade representative Jamieson Greer said the United States had offered Canada "the best treatment of any major exporter to our market."
When asked by reporters, whether the two countries were in a trade war, Mark Carney answered that you are at war when you get attacked. All three statements may be sincere. But sincerity isn’t the same as impact and some messages are clearly resonating more than others.
What this measures, and what it does not
eventy-six to thirteen. Fifty-nine to twenty-four.
Those numbers capture something very specific: public support for the government’s decision at a moment of maximum attention, just days after the trigger event, when national solidarity is high and the economic consequences are still largely theoretical.
They tell us who Canadians think is right. They do not tell us whether the policy will ultimately work.
They are unlikely to survive September 8 unchanged. And the picture could shift again once Canadians are paying 50 per cent tariffs on some U.S. goods and Americans are paying more for Canadian lumber.
What these numbers do tell us is whether the governments’ messages are reaching the audiences they were designed to reach. On that narrower question, at this moment, the evidence is clear.
The harder number is 25.4 per cent and the drop from the second-largest market to the sixth. Approval can recover. Lost shelf space is much harder to win back.
Polling: Angus Reid Institute (Canadian sample August 22–23, 2026, n=1,468; US sample July 31–August 5, 2026, n=1,000); Leger (August 15–17, 2026, n=1,622); Reuters/Ipsos (August 21–24, 2026, n=1,215). Online surveys cannot be assigned a formal margin of error; Angus Reid reports a probability-equivalent of approximately ±2 points at these sample sizes. Sales and export figures from the LCBO and the Distilled Spirits Council are self-reported by interested parties and are identified as such. Travel data is from Statistics Canada.
