Canada's merchandise trade with its top eight partners, month by month since 1997. One line towers over the rest — and hidden in its recent history is a surge, then a cliff, lined up with the 2025 U.S. tariffs. Switch between two-way, exports and imports, zoom to recent years, and click any country to isolate it.
Source: adapted from Statistics Canada, table 12‑10‑0011‑01, retrieved July 2026 · two-way trade = imports + exports, customs basis, unadjusted, current CAD · top 8 partners by trade over the last 24 months · switch two-way / exports / imports, zoom to 2023–26, hover to scrub, click a country to toggle.
A first-draft write-up — the chart and data are real; the words are a starting point to make your own.
Start with the thing that dominates everything else: press play with every country on, and the United States line pulls away from the field almost immediately and never looks back. Canada's two-way trade with the US runs several times larger than its trade with every other partner in this group combined. That scale is why the chart needs an off switch — with the US on, everyone else is pinned to the floor. Toggle the United States off and the axis rescales, revealing China's long climb and Mexico's steady rise underneath.
But the concentration is the setup, not the story. The story is what happened to that giant US line in 2025 — and you have to zoom to 2023–2026 to see it clearly, because on a thirty-year view it's a blip.
Two things happen in quick succession:
Put the two together and the annual math is stark: Canada's two-way trade with the US ran about $973 billion in 2024 and roughly $907 billion over the most recent twelve months — a drop of about 7%, some $66 billion of trade.
Switch the chart to Exports, then Imports, and watch which one moves. The decline is lopsided: what Canada sells to the US fell about 8% (roughly $49 billion), while what it buys from the US fell around half that. Two-way totals blend the two together, which is exactly why the drop is easy to miss on the default view — and why the export/import toggle earns its keep.
The two-way line just wobbles. Split it apart, and the wobble becomes a cliff.
First, these are current dollars, not volumes. Tariffs push prices up, which inflates the dollar value of trade even as the physical quantity falls — so the real drop in goods crossing the border is almost certainly larger than the ~7% the dollars show.
Second, timing is not proof. The decline lines up cleanly with the 2025 tariffs, and the front-running spike is hard to explain any other way — but a chart shows correlation. Other forces move trade too, and separating them out is its own analysis. It's also worth noting the last few months on record tick back up; whether that's adjustment, exemptions, or goods finding new routes is a question the next data release will start to answer.
The numbers come straight from Statistics Canada's monthly trade table via their open data API — 353 months of imports and exports for each partner. The whole dataset is baked into a single static file on the page, so it loads instantly and always shows exactly the figures described here. The raw table is 15 MB of rows almost nobody opens; the story inside it fits in a chart you can read in ten seconds.
Adapted from Statistics Canada, table 12‑10‑0011‑01 — "International merchandise trade for all countries and by Principal Trading Partners, monthly" — retrieved via the Statistics Canada Web Data Service in July 2026. Figures are on a customs basis, unadjusted, in current Canadian dollars; two-way trade sums monthly imports and exports for each partner. Aggregate categories (all countries, European Union) are excluded; the eight partners shown are those with the most trade over the trailing 24 months. Used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence. This does not constitute an endorsement by Statistics Canada.
If you've got data with a story trapped inside it, that's exactly the kind of problem I like.