OTTAWA — One salvo in a long-running dispute between Canada and St-Pierre-Miquelon over fishing rights has made the tiny French territory just off the southern coast of Newfoundland a big target for the Trump administration’s tariffs.

St-Pierre-Miquelon ended up on President Donald Trump’s now notorious leaderboard with a 50 per cent tariff on exports to the U.S.—tied for the top rate with Lesotho—even though it has almost no trade with the United States.

Even when it’s not being applied to uninhabited volcanic outcroppings and one of the U.S.’s own military bases in the Indian Ocean, Trump’s tariff policy has produced some unexpected outcomes.

According to U.S. figures, most months—indeed, in some whole years—the value of all goods going back and forth between the U.S. and St-Pierre-Miquelon rounds down to zero.

But 2024 was strange. Last July saw exports from the archipelago to the United States at a level unheard of in recent history: a US$3.4-million spike.

The Trump administration set the “reciprocal” tariff rates the president announced Wednesday without directly referring to any actual tariffs that other jurisdictions apply. The U.S. assumed any trade deficit it had in 2024 was largely because of unfair trade practices by its partners and calculated tariffs based on the difference, using pocket-calculator math.

St-Pierre-Miquelon (whose population is about 5,100) exported those US$3.4 million of goods to the U.S. in 2024 … and imported only $100,000 worth. The dollar figures are small but the ratio is gigantic: a 3,300 per cent trade deficit, from Washington’s point of view. The U.S. government seems to have capped the trade-deficit part of its calculations at 99 per cent; Trump cut that number in half to arrive at his final tariff levels.

So what did St-Pierre-Miquelon send to the United States last July?

“It is my understanding that the US$3.4 million was halibut,” Xavier Bowring, Canada’s honorary consul in the French overseas territorial collectivity, told The Logic. Bowring is a former president of the local chamber of commerce and managing director of a local telecom provider.

In June 2024, the French-flagged fishing boat Terre-Neuvas unloaded 16 tonnes of halibut at the docks in St-Pierre, according to news station FranceInfo’s reporting at the time. The fish were bound for sale in Boston. They’d been caught in international waters, two days’ sailing southeast of St-Pierre, but the catch was still a poke in Canada’s eye.

Canada and France had been arguing over the halibut fishery, and whether and where French fishers could catch more without endangering the industry’s long-term viability. Then-prime ministers Justin Trudeau and Gabriel Attal even discussed it amid last year’s D-Day commemorations in Normandy.

Through a spokesperson, the prefect of St-Pierre-Miquelon, Bruno André, declined to comment.

The Logic was also unable to reach the Terre-Neuvas’s operator, Éric Cormier. The boat is in the centre of a lawsuit under Canadian admiralty law, with claims and counterclaims involving Cormier, some investors from Newfoundland, and others over the deal that brought the 50-year-old vessel to St-Pierre-Miquelon in 2022.

The Terre-Neuvas’s provocative halibut catch in the Atlantic seemed to lead to a new round of negotiations over fishing quotas; talks continued in Ottawa as recently as this week.

But it’s not a trick that will be easy to pull again as long as Trump’s tariffs are in place—unless American buyers are willing to pay a whole lot more for St-Pierre-Miquelon’s fish.