it would seem to me that hiking the price of equipment in the agriculture sector, which i would presume means things like tractors, is going to in the end increase the price of canadian food products, either by forcing producers to shift the costs to consumers or by forcing producers to buy more expensive canadian machinery, when it is even available at all. there is going to be some percentage of this equipment that just is not made here.
i am not a farmer, but my understanding is that the way this works today is that farmers sign contracts with machinery manufacturers, who will actually send techs to the farms to install the equipment. the farmers don't do much farming anymore, it's contracted out to what are essentially technology companies. if these farmers are locked into 10 or more year contracts, they might not have the ability to opt out. the stated goal of coercing canadian farmers to buy canadian machinery to replace american machinery might therefore not be realistic. if they do go down that path, it might literally costs millions of dollars to turn it over.
the likely result of taxing american equipment is consequently going to be inflation in the price of canadian food, making canadian products less competitive. this is the classic mistake ricardo (a socialist, btw) warned about, and exactly the kind of dumb policy that trump has been implementing. this is why i'm accusing carney of being trump-lite. to fight trump, he's become trump, and that's a slippery slope to catastrophe.
it would seem to me that a better - and more traditionally liberal capitalist - approach would be to provide tax cuts for canadian firms and farmers when they buy canadian capital investment, instead of to tax american equipment on the way in. that's the sort of policy you would expect from an economist, not a tariff on foreign made capital investment. that's actually a terrible economic policy, from any liberal capitalist ideological position.
if you just become the thing you hate, you aren't actually fighting it.
i may have little interest in this and not care much for keeping up with competitive bouts between international capital firms, like blackrock, but i don't want to pay higher prices for bread to prop up some fucker's trust fund.
one easy way to get around this is to bring back the wheat board in it's previous role. canadian farmers are going to be selling less to the american market. that would provide price stability in the short term.