In seeking to justify his imbecilic trade war against Canada, Donald Trump complained on March 7 that “Canada has been ripping us off for years on tariffs for lumber.” You will not be surprised to learn that this claim is untrue, and that, until very recently, there were no Canadian tariffs on US lumber at all. The Canadian tariffs on US lumber that have been imposed since they were first considered in 2017 are retaliation for increases in US tariffs on Canadian lumber. As usual, Trump either doesn’t know what he is talking about or doesn’t care. The US-Canada dispute over trade in softwood lumber… has been “solved” at least two times in the past, producing the inevitable crop of initialisms: the SLA (Softwood Lumber Agreement), and CUSFTA (Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement) which begat NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) which begat USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement). [to access the full story a Dispatch subscription is required]