Canada has long said rather loudly that they're wanting to make fair deals and are all in on free trade. Their tariff rate quota (TRQ) system and layers of rules, regulations and other items that lead to anti-competitive outcomes suggest otherwise.

And living in Florida (and having spent a very brief stint in my earliest days at an international trade law firm), I'm well familiar with TRQ systems. After all, that's the system that the U.S. also uses. It provides a big wall of protection for the Florida sugar industry, to the detriment of the Caribbean and South American countries who would dearly love for the U.S. to open up those markets. We also happen to use a TRQ system as a trade barrier to prevent imports of dairy products into the U.S.:

fas.usda.gov - Dairy import licensing program

Virtually all developed nations have these kinds of systems to protect certain domestic agricultural interests. In Japan, it's rice. For the nations of the EU, it's the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Canada focuses on their dairy industry. We also use heavy trade barriers to protect certain ag sectors, like sugar and dairy and peanuts (which also has a TRQ).

This is a common feature of developed country trade regimes. It's not analogous to someone breaking into your property and stealing stuff. We're not burglars, right? We're not breaking into the property of the Caribbean nations that want to sell us sugar and stealing their nuts and washers or what have you - we're just implementing a common protectionist practice. These systems are definitely not free trade, of course - but they're ubiquitous, and we use them ourselves.

Regardless of whether you think this affects the "innocence" of Canada, the specific response that we adopted was so aggressive and hostile to be way outside the ordinary course of trade policy and trade negotiations. No one on this board is saying, or has said, that Canada has been a 100% pure free-trading country - after all, no country on earth (even the U.S.) is or has ever been that. Pointing out that the situation is entirely the result of Trump's policy is not claiming that Canada has a 100% pure free-trading record, but instead an observation that Trump's choice of a maximally hostile and unilateral punitive tariff (of that specific magnitude and scope) is what has led us to the current situation.

cbp.gov: Quota Bulletin 26-210 2026 Peanuts