If the Trump administration's tariff policy is meant to target unfair Chinese trade, it sure has a funny way of going about it.

So far, the U.S. Department of Commerce has excluded about 40 per cent of imports of Chinese steel from facing its 25 per cent tariff. But to date, only two per cent of the total volume of Canadian steel imports to the U.S. has been cleared to dodge the tariff.

The head-scratching discrepancy gets even stranger with the United States' 10 per cent tariff on aluminum imports.

About 86 per cent of Chinese aluminum imports now enter the U.S. tariff-free, while less than one per cent of Canadian aluminum shipments do.

"If the whole point was to do this for China in the first place, then why are the approval rates for China so much higher than other countries?" said Christine McDaniel, a former White House economic adviser, now a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

"It just doesn't make sense."...

This was excerpted from the 9 February 2019 editon of CBC News.