FortNine Add Jalopnik on Google: Google Discover The United States, as part of its extremely well-planned trade war against the loathéd enemy that is Canada, has banned imports of high displacement Canadian motorcycles. If this sounds dumb, that's because it is — there are two Canadian motorcycles, neither of them are actually affected by the ban, and the only vehicles actually kept from our shores are the bigger Can-Am trikes that no one's ever seen in real life anyway. So what's the real point here? What does the United States get out of a ban on just two low-volume vehicles? Well, the particulars of international trade are arcane and byzantine, so it's complicated to parse through how we got here and where we're going. Lucky for us, then, that the bright Canadians up at FortNine took on the task from their end of the border, to tell us Yankee yokels just how dumb all of this is. Trade wars aren't fought over motorcycles RyanF9's determination is that the trade war is not, in fact, over motorcycles — something that's pretty obvious, but something that's worth noting. The ban on Canadian motorcycles (in fact a ban on high-displacement bikes specifically) is in retaliation for Canada's tariff on Harley-Davidson bikes. The Harley tariff is of course a response to other American trade acts, which are a response to Canadian trade acts, and on and on. A snowball effect is how we got to this current dumb place, in which we're banning things that don't exist. But, when the goal is to make the politicians who make the decisions look good to their own supporters, the image starts to crystalize into something that makes sense. We didn't get here through careful planning or investigations of trade inequities, we got here because men in suits want to feel big and strong, no matter the cost.
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