I Read America's 92-Page Forced Labour Report and the Hypocrisy Left Me Speechless
800,000 prison workers would like a word.
There’s a particular kind of audacity that stops you mid-scroll.
Not loud audacity. Not the blustering, fist-pounding kind. The quiet kind. The kind that arrives in a 92-page government report, written in bureaucratic prose so dry it practically crackles, making an argument so breathtaking in its hypocrisy that you have to read it twice just to make sure you understood it correctly.
On June 2, 2026, the United States Trade Representative released findings from 60 simultaneous investigations into whether America’s trading partners were doing enough to ban goods made with forced labour.
All 60 failed.
Every single one. Canada. The European Union. Mexico. Ecuador. All of them: guilty. Not one trading partner, out of sixty investigated, was deemed to have adequate enforcement.
Sixty for sixty. A perfect score. Statistically preposterous, as one trade expert put it to CBC News, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The fun part comes later.
The proposed punishment for Canada: a new 10% tariff on exports not covered by CUSMA.
The justification: Canada is soft on forced labour.
The narrator, in this particular story, is a country whose own Constitution still explicitly permits it.
Let’s Start With the Country That Has Forced Labour Written Into Its Constitution
The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in 1865. It is one of the most celebrated legal documents in American history, the culmination of a civil war, the supposed turning point of a nation.
It also has an asterisk.
“Except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”
That asterisk has been doing a lot of work for 160 years.
Today, approximately 800,000 incarcerated workers perform labour inside U.S. state and federal prisons. The majority do so by compulsion. Wages average between 13 and 52 cents per hour. In several Southern states, built on the same land where enslaved people once worked, the wages are zero. Nothing. Not a thin dime.
Workers who refuse assignments face solitary confinement, loss of family visitation, and denial of parole.
In 2025, Walk Free, the international human rights organization behind the Global Slavery Index, concluded that “modern slavery remains legal in the United States and the government is profiting from it.” They called on Washington to “publicly acknowledge the existence of serious human rights violations that amount to state-imposed forced labour” and to “repeal legislation and criminalize practices that enable state-imposed forced labour to continue.”
Washington’s response, apparently, was to open 60 investigations into other countries.
The Economic Policy Institute has documented the racial geometry of this system in detail. Black Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white Americans. The prison labour infrastructure in the South bears what EPI calls a “direct lineage” to convict leasing, the post-Reconstruction practice of leasing overwhelmingly Black incarcerated workers to private employers, often under conditions that worked them to death. The crops are sometimes the same. The land is sometimes the same.
The United States incarceration rate is 614 per 100,000 people. Canada’s is 88.
So. When the U.S. government sits down to write a 92-page report about forced labour enforcement failures, and Canada is in it, and the U.S. is not, that takes a certain kind of confidence.
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The Part Where Their Own Star Witness Asks Them to Stop
Here’s what the USTR report doesn’t mention, because it would have been awkward.
The human rights organization whose research formed the evidentiary backbone of the case against Canada, Above Ground, publicly asked the United States not to impose these tariffs.
In April 2026, Above Ground submitted a formal comment to the USTR urging Washington to back off. When the tariffs were announced anyway, Above Ground’s director Karen Hamilton told CBC News:
“In the current context, there’s very little appetite in Canada to be told what to do by this current U.S. administration, especially on issues of human rights and labour rights.”
She added that her organization stands by its findings that Canada’s enforcement is inadequate. But:
“We are concerned that this will undermine our efforts to achieve real change and actually have measures that do combat forced labour and that do uplift the rights of workers.”
Read that again. The people who identified the problem, who have spent years pushing Canada to do better, who genuinely care about the workers caught in these supply chains, they looked at the U.S. tariff announcement and said: This will make things worse.
The U.S. used their research, ignored its objection, and proceeded anyway.
When your own witnesses ask you to stop, and you keep going, you’ve moved from “moral intervention” into something else entirely.
What Actually Happened: A 20-Day Sprint to Find a New Legal Hook
To understand June 2, 2026, you have to go back to February 20, 2026.
That was the day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. The ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump struck down the entire architecture of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. The sweeping 10-50% duties were imposed on April 2, 2025. Gone.
The financial hit was staggering. The Tax Foundation estimated the IEEPA tariffs had already collected more than $160 billion in customs duties. Over the next decade, they would have raised $1.4 trillion. The Supreme Court erased nearly three-quarters of the administration’s planned tariff revenue in a single morning.
They needed a replacement. Fast.
Section 301(b) of the Trade Act of 1974, one of the few remaining statutory pathways not invalidated by the ruling, allows the president to impose tariffs on countries whose trade practices are “unreasonable or discriminatory.”
Twenty days after the Supreme Court ruling, USTR Jamieson Greer launched 60 simultaneous Section 301 investigations. Sixty. At once. No prior administration had ever launched more than a handful at a time. Eighty-two days later, all 60 were found guilty.
David Henig, policy director at the European Centre for International Political Economy, told CBC the finding was “actually preposterous.” He said the evidence doesn’t justify the tariffs and described the forced labour framing as “an excuse to impose the tariffs that they wanted to do anyway.”
That’s the architecture. Supreme Court kills the tariffs. Administration needs a legal hook. Forced labour, real, documented, genuinely concerning in global supply chains, gets conscripted into service as the hook.
The cause didn’t matter. The pretext did.
The Enforcement Numbers They Didn’t Want You to See
The USTR report makes a point of comparing Canada’s enforcement record unfavourably to America’s own. Canada blocked two shipments in six years. The U.S., meanwhile, denied entry to “more than 6,300 shipments in 2024 alone” under the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act.
Impressive. There’s just one number missing from that paragraph.
In fiscal year 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection detained $1.38 billion in goods suspected of having originated through forced labour. In 2025, the first full year of the Trump administration, that number dropped to $171 million.
That’s an 87.6% collapse. In one year.
In December 2025, Democratic members of Congress, including Representatives Raja Krishnamoorthi and Rosa DeLauro, sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security and CBP explicitly stating that enforcement had “decreased significantly” following Trump’s April 2025 tariff announcements. Their conclusion:
“These and other data suggest that combating forced labour is not a priority for this Administration.”
William Pellerin, a partner with McMillan LLP’s international trade group, told the Globe and Mail that the numbers raise “some really important questions” about the aggressiveness with which the U.S. is judging others, “given its own efforts appear to be abating.”
The USTR report omitted this data entirely.
Apparently, selective memory is a feature, not a bug, in 92-page government accountability documents.
Two and a Half Percentage Points: The Full Price of Moral Equivalence
Canada was placed in the second tier of violators: countries that have a forced labour import ban but “failed to effectively enforce” it. Canada’s companies in this tier: Ecuador, the European Union, Indonesia, Mexico, and Pakistan.
The first tier, economies found to have failed entirely, many with no forced labour legislation at all, includes China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, and 50 others.
Canada’s proposed tariff: 10%. The worst-tier countries not covered by existing agreements: 12.5%.
Two and a half percentage points. That’s the moral distance, in tariff terms, between Canada, a country with functioning labour protections, a supply chain transparency law, and an active import ban, and authoritarian states with no forced labour protections whatsoever.
If this were a genuine calibration of moral failure, the numbers would span an order of magnitude. The fact that they don’t tells you everything you need to know about what this exercise actually was.
It was a revenue instrument seeking justification. It found sixty of them in 82 days.
Canada Does Have a Problem. A Tariff Won’t Touch It.
None of this is to say Canada’s hands are clean.
Two blocked shipments in six years, across a trade relationship handling C$800 billion in goods annually, is a meaningful gap. The CBSA’s opacity around enforcement statistics is a legitimate concern. Canadian civil society organizations, including Above Ground, the same group the USTR conscripted into its case against Canada, have been saying for years that Canada needs stronger import controls, particularly for goods from Xinjiang.
They’re right. These are real problems. They predate Trump’s return to office and will outlast it.
But here’s the thing about tariffs: they don’t hire customs inspectors. They don’t fund supply chain audits. They don’t help organizations like Above Ground document labour abuses in remote corners of global supply chains. They tax American importers and consumers and deposit the proceeds into the U.S. Treasury. Tariffs are not a remedy. They’re a cash register.
If the administration actually cared about forced labour in Canadian supply chains, the tool was already sitting on the table. CUSMA’s labour chapter, which the U.S. itself demanded during the 2018 negotiations, explicitly commits all three parties to prohibit the importation of forced labour goods. Bilateral enforcement mechanisms exist.
They were not used.
Instead: tariffs. A blunt instrument making no distinction between Canada and Cambodia, deployed not because it solves the problem but because a federal judge can’t strike it down as easily as the thing the Supreme Court just finished shredding.
Prime Minister Carney’s pledge to “beef up” Canada’s forced labour laws is a reasonable policy step. It’s also a dangerous precedent: the U.S. can now extract domestic legislative concessions from its closest allies by threatening tariffs under whatever legal theory is most convenient this quarter. Today, it’s forced labour. Next quarter, who knows? The creativity here is genuinely impressive.
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The Verdict, Which Was Never Actually in Question
Let’s take stock of where we are.
The United States has 800,000 prison workers earning between 13 and 52 cents an hour, with zero wages in some Southern states, compelled to work under threat of solitary confinement, covered by zero federal labour standards, operating under a constitutional carveout that was literally written as a footnote to the abolition of slavery.
The international human rights community has called this state-imposed forced labour. The U.S. government has not disagreed. It has simply declined to address it while opening investigations into 60 other countries.
The human rights organization whose research the USTR used as its case against Canada publicly asked them to stop. The U.S. proceeded. Apparently, being asked to stop by your own evidence is no reason to pause.
The U.S.’s own forced labour enforcement collapsed 87.6% in 2025, the exact same year it decided the world’s trading partners were not enforcing hard enough.
All 60 economies investigated failed. Every single one. A statistically perfect sweep that trade experts called preposterous on the record.
And Canada, with its functioning import ban and supply chain transparency legislation, sits 2.5 percentage points away from Saudi Arabia in the tariff schedule.
This is not moral leadership. This is a country that lost its preferred tariff weapon in the Supreme Court, needed a replacement within the month, found a legal hook in the Trade Act of 1974, and dressed the whole exercise in the language of human rights because “we need to replace $1.4 trillion in projected customs revenue” doesn’t look great in a press release.
The 13th Amendment’s asterisk has been doing a lot of work for 160 years. It just got a new job title: trade policy justification.
Canada has real work to do on forced labour. The people who have been saying so the longest looked at these tariffs and said: This will make things worse.
They’re the ones who would know. Not the government running a constitutionally sanctioned forced labour system while writing 92-page reports about everyone else’s.
The Sanity Project Research Desk prepared the white paper on which this post is based. All sources are publicly available.
Sources Used For This Deep Dive
https://taxfoundation.org/blog/supreme-court-trump-tariffs-ruling/
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/trade/uyghur-forced-labor-prevention-act-statistics