Shipping containers in the Port of Montreal last year.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
Human-rights advocates are asking Prime Minister Mark Carney to toughen Canada’s system for blocking imports of goods made with forced labour, calling on the government to adopt a legal presumption that would treat all products from China’s Xinjiang region as tainted by forced labour unless importers can prove otherwise.
It’s the same system that the U.S. government adopted several years ago and it results in significantly more blocked imports.
The United States said in a new report this week that Canada is failing to stop foreign goods made with forced labour from entering its market. The finding coincides with Washington’s formal probe into the matter, an investigation that could lead to more tariffs on Canadian products.
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The 2026 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers from the U.S. government on Tuesday said it appears Canada is importing goods that cost less than they should because they were made with forced labour.
It’s an early indication of how the U.S. will rule on Canada as it pursues investigations of 60 countries under Section 301 (b) of the Trade Act, probes that could result in the U.S. imposing tariffs of as much as 25 per cent on goods from countries that it deems to be falling short, analysts say. These probes were announced in mid-March.
In a March 31 letter to Mr. Carney, staff and advisory-board members of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project said this reverse-onus approach would result in more goods with forced labour being blocked from Canada and reduce the likelihood that this country faces new tariffs from the Trump administration.
They said this “reverse-onus” approach could also be applied to other regions of the world at high risk of having forced labour in their work force.
Canada had committed in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement to block imports made with forced labour and introduced amendments to the Customs Tariff Act in 2020.
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In the past five years, however, only two shipments were ultimately blocked from entering Canada after the Canada Border Services Agency determined that they were produced with forced labour: a shipment of textile products in 2024 and a shipment of frozen seafood in 2025. Both were from China.
“We believe that you will want to demonstrate strong action on forced labour here in Canada, a provision required in CUSMA, in order to avoid serious tariff increases and because it is the right thing to do for the Uyghurs and others experiencing forced labour right now,” the letter said, referring to the Canadian name for the continental trade agreement.
Among signatories were Mehmet Tohti, executive director of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, and Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, senior fellow at the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa.
Mr. Tohti, in an interview, noted that the former Justin Trudeau government had promised new legislation in its fall 2024 economic statement that included measures “increasing the onus on importers to demonstrate that their supply chains are free of forced labour.” That has never materialized, he noted.
Data from the Chinese government’s customs agency show a big jump in shipments to Canada from Xinjiang in recent years. The value of shipments rose to US$601.1-million in 2025 from US$231.4-million in 2024 and US$59.1-million in 2023.
William Pellerin, partner with McMillan LLP’s international trade group, said Canada would face huge administrative costs if it had to intercept all shipments from Xinjiang and hold them in warehouses while staff has received and reviewed evidence that they were free of forced labour. “They would presumably need hundreds of new border agents to do something like this across the country,” he said.
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He said Canada could also be vulnerable to a challenge by China at the World Trade Organization – a referee for global trade – over such a measure. Mr. Pellerin also predicted that it could damage relations with Beijing at a time when Mr. Carney is trying to attract more business from the Chinese.
“China has proven to be very sensitive on this topic, and it would almost certainly lead to important frictions between Canada and China.”
In a Jan. 22 statement, human-rights experts appointed by the United Nations warned of “persistent allegations of forced labour affecting Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz minority groups as well as Tibetans” within Xinjiang and other parts of China.
The experts said in a release on the website of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights that forced labour in China is enabled through a state-mandated “poverty alleviation through labour transfer” program, which coerces Uyghurs and members of other minority groups into jobs in Xinjiang and other regions.
Those affected, experts said, are “reportedly subjected to systematic monitoring, surveillance and exploitation, with no choice to refuse or change the work due to a pervasive fear of punishment and arbitrary detention”
The Chinese government rejects all allegations of forced labour, and its embassy in a March 31 statement on Twitter said that “claims of so-called ‘forced labour’ and ‘genocide’ are completely baseless.”
With reports from Jason Kirby in Toronto