(The Epoch Times)—The U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution seeking to end President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada.
The lower chamber voted 219–211 on Feb. 11. Six Republicans—Reps. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Jeff Hurd (R-Colo.), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), and Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.)—joined all but one of their Democratic colleagues.
Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) was the lone Democratic vote against the measure.
As House members rebuked his trade agenda, Trump vowed on Truth Social that “any Republican, in the House or the Senate, that votes against tariffs will seriously suffer the consequences come election time, and that includes primaries!”
In March, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced legislation to terminate the president’s tariffs on Canada, alleging that they were a “misuse of emergency authorities.”
“The Speaker continues to abdicate his responsibilities, ceding Congress’s Article I authority to Donald Trump,” Meeks said in a Feb. 10 statement on X.
“Republicans now face a clear choice: go on the record and join Democrats in ending these cost-raising tariffs, or keep forcing American families to pay for them.”
The vote comes one day after three Republicans—Reps. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.), and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.)—voted with Democrats to defeat a rule that would have blocked votes in the lower chamber on the president’s tariffs through July 31.
House Republicans have relied on this procedural rule to prevent members from rebuking Trump’s trade strategy.
As part of the president’s global trade agenda, blanket tariffs were imposed on Canada surrounding border-security concerns and the flow of fentanyl.
Trump paused levies for one month this past spring after Ottawa had committed to bolstering security at the U.S.-Canada border.
The president later amended his executive action to exempt goods compliant with the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement.
Congress has attempted to reverse these import duties on one of America’s largest trading partners.
Now that it has passed in the lower chamber, it needs to make its way through the Senate before it can head to the president’s desk for his signature.
While he is likely to veto the bill, it could be a symbolic victory for his Democratic opponents, who are spotlighting their pushback against the tariffs.
This is not the first time lawmakers have attempted to curb Trump’s use of emergency statutes, particularly the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Four Republicans—Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)—voted with Democrats in October to pass a resolution scrapping IEEPA.
The emergency‑powers statute lets a president control international trade during a declared national emergency and has typically been used to restrict commerce with foreign nations. Trump relied on this law to justify placing tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, citing threats related to fentanyl and unlawful immigration.
U.S. officials are still waiting for a Supreme Court determination on whether IEEPA can be used to justify these tariffs.
Newhouse, who is not running for reelection, told The Epoch Times after the vote that “the court’s going to help us” assess the constitutionality of the president’s trade measures.
“I think that we have a say in some of these issues, like tariffs on imports. That’s Congress’s realm,” he added, telling reporters that his Washington district has many Canadian-owned businesses.
The vote marked a rare moment of opposition to the president from at least some House Republicans. Yet, Democrats sounded pessimistic about the prospect of snowballing defections from within Trump’s party.
“I appreciate the handful of Republicans who had the courage to vote yes. There’s a lot more who didn’t have the courage to vote yes, but disagree with Trump’s tariffs,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) told The Epoch Times.
Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), who chairs the House Democratic Caucus, told The Epoch Times that Trump “controls, kind of, what’s on the floor.”
US–Canada Trade Relationship
Trade relations between the United States and Canada have deteriorated.
Shortly after Canada reached a new trade agreement with China—effectively allowing thousands of new Chinese electric vehicles into the country in exchange for lower tariff rates on canola—Trump threatened a 100 percent tariff on Canadian goods.
“If ‘Governor’ Carney thinks he is going to make Canada a ‘Drop Off Port’ for China to send goods and products into the United States, he is sorely mistaken,” Trump posted on Truth Social last month.
“China will eat Canada alive, completely devour it, including the destruction of their businesses, social fabric, and general way of life.”
Appearing before the Senate Banking Committee on Feb. 5, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told lawmakers that the administration could not allow its “northern border be used as a way for Chinese EVs” to enter the United States.
This was a reversal of the president’s immediate reaction, when he told reporters it was a “good thing” for Prime Minister Mark Carney to get a deal done with Beijing.
In his speech at the World Economic Forum, Carney told the audience that the “old order is not coming back.”
“Middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” Carney said.
Trump, during his speech in Davos, stated that Canada should be grateful to the United States.
“I watched your prime minister yesterday. He wasn’t so grateful, but they should be grateful to us. Canada lives because of the United States,” Trump said.
While the Canadian economy has struggled for the past decade, economic conditions have worsened since the Trump administration implemented tariffs on Canadian imports.
In November, the gross domestic product was measured at zero percent following a 0.3 percent contraction in October, according to Statistics Canada.
Preliminary estimates suggest the Canadian economy expanded 0.1 percent in December.
Additionally, Canada lost nearly 25,000 jobs in January, falling short of the consensus estimate of a 7,000 gain.
By comparison, the U.S. economy registered 3.8 percent growth in the second quarter and 4.4 percent in the third quarter.
It is on track to post an expansion of about 4 percent in the final three months of 2025.
The United States, Canada, and Mexico will engage in a joint review of the post-NAFTA trade deal this summer.
Nathan Worcester contributed to this report.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
