American consumers will pay for the collapse of U.S.-Canada trade talks in ways hard to see. Here are the Virginia congressional districts with the most jobs at risk.

Over the weekend, the United States blundered into another war. This one is a trade war with Canada.

This will seem insignificant to Americans until they have to pay for it.

Americans give little thought to our northern neighbor, even though our ability to project military power around the world is aided by the fact that we don’t have to have an army hunkered down to guard a 5,525-mile border. If you look in your refrigerator or kitchen cabinets, you will find few, if any, products labeled “Made in Canada” and think that we don’t really need the Great White North. This misses the fact that what we do buy from Canada is primarily raw materials that make our modern life possible.

About 60% of the crude oil we import comes from Canada. We depend more on Canada for oil than we do on all the countries of the Middle East combined. The metaphorical “Strait of Our Moose” matters more than the literal Strait of Hormuz. This is a dramatic change from the 1970s when Saudi Arabia was our main oil supplier and Canada accounted for less than 6% of our imports. It should go without saying that this switch, which has mostly happened within this century, has made us more secure — or at least less dependent on a volatile and often hostile part of the world. Ultimately about 25% of our gasoline is of Canadian origin. Why can’t we simply “drill, baby, drill” to produce more of our own oil? We can, if we want, but it would not matter that much because U.S. wells generally produce “light” oil while our refineries are built to work with “heavy” crude. We have oil, but not the kind we need — and reconfiguring refineries is an expensive proposition that consumers would ultimately have to pay for. This is where economics runs head-on into chemistry. With the tariffs the Trump administration is now imposing on Canada, all that oil just became more expensive. (Update: The latest word is that the tariffs on oil will be less than the 50% on other products).

Most of the natural gas we use comes from domestic production, but when we do need to import natural gas, almost all of it comes from Canada. About 8% of our natural gas comes from north of the border. That share of our natural gas just became more expensive.

About 18% of electricity in the United States comes from nuclear power (in Virginia, it’s about 28%). That nuclear power comes from uranium, and virtually all of the uranium we use for power generation is imported — with Canada being our biggest supplier, at 32%. That fuel source just became more expensive.

The key ingredient in the fertilizer that American farmers use to produce higher yields is potash — 85% of that comes from Canada. At the same time that it’s become more expensive to keep the lights on, it also just became more expensive to grow food.

About half the aluminium used in the United States comes from Canada. That just became more expensive, which means at some point a can of soda or a can of beer or a can of anything else will become more expensive.

We now have batteries in almost everything, from small ones in computers to big ones in battery storage for energy. They depend on a variety of minerals, but one key ore is nickel: About half the nickel we use comes from Canada. Nickel is also a key component in jet engines, particularly military jets that come under a lot of stress. Nickel is good at handling that. Our ability to relentlessly bomb Iran or any other country depends on our access to Canadian nickel.

The economic point of tariffs is to protect a domestic industry from foreign competition, but unless we invest in a vast reconfiguration of U.S. refineries, or find more potash deposits or aluminum deposits or nickel deposits or uranium deposits (or are willing to mine the one under Cole’s Hill in Pittsylvania County), there is nothing on this list that can be protected — these tariffs simply jack up prices for American consumers. The question is whether Americans are willing to endure these higher prices so that certain manufacturers can get better access to Canadian markets. One of the sticking points — a very emotional one for Canadians — was the U.S. insistence that Canada drop or relax its “Canadian content” rule on broadcasting that requires a certain amount of homemade content on television and radio. The Trump administration might like to bash Hollywood in its political rhetoric, but here it was trying to do Hollywood’s bidding. These are strange times we’re in.

Because we don’t see many “Made in Canada” labels on the products we use, we are led to misunderstand the nature of our economic relationship. While we largely import raw materials from Canada (raw materials that we don’t have and are hard to source elsewhere), we export a lot of consumer products north. We forget that consumers — Canadian consumers — have a voice in this, too. One thing that the United States wanted, and which Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was apparently willing to relent on, was to get American alcohol back on the shelves of Canadian liquor stores. (Canadians drink more than Americans do on a per-capita basis.) One reason Carney was willing to give on this point was apparently his belief that, sure, Canadian stores could stock American booze but Canadian consumers are so outraged right now that they won’t buy it. President Donald Trump prides himself on “The Art of the Deal,” but he has over time managed to anger some of our key customers. This is not a wise strategy in any business.

Canada is Virginia’s single-largest export market. We sell $9.2 billion worth of stuff each year north of the border; that’s about 15% of our total goods exports. There are Virginia jobs that depend on Canadians to buy what we produce — those now hinge on the retaliatory tariffs that Carney vows to impose, and the willingness of Canadian consumers and businesses to buy those products at a time when it’s now the Canadian government’s stated goal to diversify its economy by finding customers and suppliers elsewhere.

Gov. Abigail Spanberger fired off a letter Monday to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to criticize the tariffs. “The Administration’s actions have directly contributed to a marked decline in Virginia’s agricultural and forestry exports, and the sectors are now absorbing sharp tariff-driven losses across our Commonwealth,” Spanberger wrote. “Beyond agriculture, Virginia’s small businesses — whether in retail, manufacturing, or hospitality — operate on thin margins and have very little capacity to absorb sustained cost increases from tariffs on imported goods. Thus, business owners have been forced to choose between trying to absorb higher costs or, regrettably, having to pass these increased costs on to customers who themselves are already stretched thin.”

Just how many Virginia jobs depend on Canadian trade? Hang on, and I will tell you. Here is where there is miscalculation on both sides of the border.

The Trump administration seems to believe that because the United States is bigger, Canada must eventually give in. The problem with that logic is that on this issue Canadians have a higher pain tolerance on trade issues than Americans do. Former President George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote in The Atlantic: “Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has much more political permission to accept pain from a U.S.-Canadian trade war than Trump does.”

For Canadians, the American attempt to curtail its use of the French language — Canada requires labels and user manuals be in both English and French; the U.S. objected — is an assault on its national identity. Carney says his nation is now “at war,” or at least something close to the moral equivalent of war. Americans will soon get distracted by something else — except to wonder why the price of fuel and food is going up. Why Trump thinks this, combined with his announcement that we’ll be importing foreign beef and selling it at below-market rates, is a winning strategy before the midterms is a mystery. Even Midwestern Republican senators are pushing back on that as bad for their farming constituents. The United States has all the customary metrics of power and leverage; Canada has more resolve. What we have here is a staredown between a real estate developer who has declared bankruptcy six times and a former central banker. The former loves theatrics and acting out on social media; the latter shut down the talks with just two cold, calm words to his negotiators: “Meeting’s adjourned.”

Canadians, though, have miscalculated, too, just in different ways. The belief among political commentators in Canada is that their nation’s retaliatory tariffs will deal a death blow to Republicans in the midterms that will teach Trump a lesson. The math I see leads me to be more skeptical. Everyone is going to pay a price for this breakdown in trade talks; the question is who will have to pay when, and timing is often critical in politics.

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs will not take effect until Sept. 8. It will take time for the impacts to ripple through the marketplace; companies will have inventory they can still sell off, and contracts that must still be honored. If these tariffs stick — and with Trump, it’s always hard to tell — there will be impacts, but they may not come in time to register with consumers as a consequence of the tariffs.

As with many things, there may be exceptions. Trump may have made a fatal mistake for some of his fellow Republicans — there are key Senate races in Maine, Michigan and Ohio, all of which have a higher-than-average number of jobs tied to Canadian exports. In Maine, 41% of the state’s exports go north. In Michigan, 36%. In Ohio, 31%.

Maine and Michigan also buy an unusually high percentage of Canadian imports: 67% of imports in Maine come from Canada, 44% in Michigan do. The Republican candidates in those states will not be helped by these new import taxes — although some Ohio auto workers may support the U.S. stance to make it more difficult for American car companies to produce vehicles in Canada.

However, these tariffs seem unlikely to lead to a widespread voter backlash — at least right away — in Virginia. Here’s why: The two congressional districts with the most economic ties to Canada are both strongly Democratic districts: the 8th and 11th in Northern Virginia, where the biggest exports are in services, not goods. The third congressional district with the most economic ties to Canada is also our most Republican district: the 9th District in Southwest Virginia, where 6,000 jobs are tied directly or indirectly to Canadian exports. The main driver there appears to be the Volvo plant in Pulaski County.

Virginia’s biggest swing district — the perpetually close 2^nd District in Hampton Roads — has some of the least at stake, with only 925 jobs directly involved in Canadian trade (plus 1,900 indirectly). In a close race, almost anything can make a difference, but we’d be having a different conversation if the 2nd District (where Democratic Elaine Luria is challenging Republican incumbent Jen Kiggans) numbers were more like the 9th District numbers or 8th District numbers or 11th District numbers.

Here’s the full list of jobs tied to Canadian exports by congressional district, compiled by the Canadian government no doubt for lobbying purposes:

These aren’t insignificant numbers when viewed in the aggregate. I just suspect we’ll feel an Alberta clipper hit before we feel the full impact of these tariffs, and by then the election will be over, whichever way it goes. Still, these are all things to think about the next time you pump some gas, drink something out of an aluminum can or eat some food. Even if you grew that tomato in your own garden, if you dumped some fertilizer on it back in the spring, you owe some of that to potash from Saskatchewan.

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I wrote this column at the Sheetz store at the intersection of Plantation Road and Williamson Road in Roanoke County. Sheetz seems a pretty all-American store, but the music being piped through the store on Monday included “Dreams Tonite” by the Canadian band Alvvays. I doubt anyone other than me noticed, but that’s how many Canadian imports work. We don’t really notice them. Nonethelesss, maybe a quarter of the gas being pumped out front probably came from Canada, along with half the cans holding the beer back in the beer cave.

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