Canadian pharmacies already pay tariffs. What does this actually change?
Canadian pharmacies pay Canadian tariffs. Americans pay American tariffs. American importers are no longer exempted from paying American tariffs applied by the US government for goods de minimis goods they import from Canada.
This post is about American importers no longer having exemption on tariffs they would have otherwise paid to the US government.
At no point has Canadian pharmacies ever paid American tariffs. This is fiction you invented.
These duties were annoying but bearable. However these new changes will effectively shut down all consumer orders of drugs from Canada starting on Oct 22. So if you need these drugs to stay alive, order them right now.
PS This new rule is going to put my family’s health at risk and I’m deeply pissed about it. Having some HNer pick this moment for pedantry is incredibly on brand.
It's very dangerous to assume common understanding here when Trump has been loudly claiming the opposite, i.e. that the tariffs would be paid by the sender rather than the importer. It would have been more accurate to state that "Canadian pharmacies have already been including the tarrifs in the total order cost".
And that's the problem. It doesn't get much more simple than "Canadians pay Canadian import taxes" and "Americans pay American import taxes". Can you at least recognize that reality? For any country, its own people pay its tariffs.
> required consumers to pay new duties.
Required American consumers to pay new American levied duties.
To be ultra pedantic, you're paying American import tariffs to the American shipping carrier or American broker not CBP itself.
> refunds for it like Americans supposedly did
No one's getting those refunds, if they do get a portion back and not at the rate at which they increased prices on American consumers.
But more to your point, you can certainly pay American import tariffs on behalf of Americans, but your response is to raise prices on American consumers commensurate to the tariffs you're paying. Your margins are necessarily lower to sell to Americans, so you must raise prices for American consumers.
If your margins were high enough that you can absorb American import tariffs, then you're lucky the market hadn't provided a relevant market substitute.