Port Milwaukee’s steel volumes are down thirty percent this year. Duluth-Superior, the biggest tonnage mover on the Great Lakes, dropped twenty-five percent. Canadian-flagged vessels calling on American ports fell thirty-seven percent. This is what a trade war looks like when it stops being a press conference and starts being a paycheck.
Trump slapped fifty percent tariffs on Canadian goods in August. Canada hit back with twenty billion in retaliatory tariffs on steel, agricultural equipment, and paper. The president called it winning. The dock workers watching ships not arrive probably have a different word for it.
The Great Lakes shipping corridor moves the raw material that American industry runs on. Every ton of iron ore that doesn’t arrive is a furnace that sits cold and a worker who goes home early. But the guy who ordered the tariffs has never loaded a container or watched a port go quiet. He just signs things.