WASHINGTON — An advocacy group aligned with the President said Wednesday that his new 50 percent tariff on certain Canadian goods, including hockey sticks, has retroactively won the United States every international hockey game played since 1930, and released a revised list of results reflecting what it described as “the correct scores, finally.”
On Monday, the President signed three proclamations imposing additional tariffs of 50 percent on a range of Canadian products, from wine to hockey sticks to cement, under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a provision that had never before been used. The duties, set to take effect in 30 days, cover roughly $20 billion in annual imports, or about 5 percent of the goods the United States buys from Canada.
“Ninety-six years that law sat on a shelf, waiting for the right president,” said Wendell Karsh, executive director of Americans for an Obvious Prize. “It waited through Hoover. It waited through all of them. And the first thing it did when it woke up was fix hockey.”
According to the group’s 63-page report, the tariff has reversed the outcomes of 11,400 hockey games played since the law’s passage, all of which are now recorded as American victories. The total includes several thousand games the United States did not play in, which the group said have been awarded to the United States “on the merits.” “The tariff doesn’t care who was on the ice. The tariff cares who’s winning now,” Karsh said. The report also lists 212 games that have not yet been scheduled, which it says the country has “already won, at the border.” In a footnote, the group reports that hockey sticks already present in American garages have begun scoring on their own, and that a stick in Lake Ternby, Minn., scored four times on a parked minivan on Tuesday night.
Prof. Desmond Achterberg, who holds the Prewitt Chair in Comparative Annoyance at Ellery State University, said the retroactive application of trade law to sporting results had a long, if mostly unpublished, history. “In the 18th century, it was common for a nation to tax a rival’s cricket bats and then declare that it had always been better at cricket,” Achterberg said. “The scholarship, which I am currently writing, regards this as entirely normal and possibly the origin of the scoreboard.”
Asked how a tariff that has not yet taken effect could have changed results from 1930, Karsh said that was “exactly the kind of question people asked about the ballroom.”
The group said it has asked the U.S. trade representative to extend the tariff to Canadian ice, which it described as “the real problem, frankly,” and which it said has been entering the country for decades, mostly in drinks.