Some policy tells you it is serious, and some tells you it is leverage. A new 50% tariff on Canadian wine, hockey sticks and cement is emphatically the second kind — and it arrived the same week the legal basis for the whole tariff regime is being rewritten.
The specific goods are almost a punchline, and that is the point. You do not build industrial policy around hockey sticks; you build a negotiating position around them. Meanwhile the EU fined AliExpress $629 million, its largest-ever Digital Services Act penalty — the same fight, a different continent.
What you cannot do is model earnings off a tariff whose legal foundation is under active revision. Unknown is a legitimate answer, and a more honest one than a confident forecast.
Here is the part worth saying plainly for the book. You cannot build an earnings model on a policy whose legal foundation is being rewritten this week, and you should not try — the honest input is ‘unknown,’ and unknown argues for breadth. That is why the international exposure lives in index sleeves rather than in a single exporter with a concentrated cross-border supply chain. For the households we do cross-border work for, the live decision is currency and residency timing; for the portfolio, the answer is diversification, which never needed to guess right about hockey sticks.
No trade, a planning note. For clients with a cross-border situation — and we do a fair amount of Canadian cross-border work — the actionable item is currency and residency timing, not portfolio positioning. A rule that can be written in a year can be unwritten in a year, and diversification, not prediction, is how a book absorbs that.