The last time Statistics Canada published the year-end export breakdown, in February 2026, the figure that came back was 71.7%. Not 75%. Not "three-quarters." 71.7%.

That 75% number is everywhere. It shows up in policy briefs, parliamentary debates, op-eds arguing for closer North American integration, and op-eds arguing for less dependence on American markets. It gets cited by people who want tariff retaliation and people who want tariff de-escalation. Both sides are working from the same bad anchor.

The actual share, verified by Statistics Canada as of December 31, 2025, is 71.7%. The difference matters because three percentage points on a roughly $780-billion export base is about $23 billion in annual trade that isn't going where the headline suggests it's going.

Where the 75% figure comes from

Most likely, people are rounding. Or they're citing an older figure from a different year, or from a different data series that uses a slightly different methodology. Or they saw "three-quarters" in a headline five years ago and it stuck. The number has enough plausibility that nobody checks it.

But plausibility is not the same as accuracy, and in a year when a U.S. administration imposed 50% tariffs on Canadian goods and Canada responded with a C$29.8-billion retaliatory package, the error isn't neutral. Overstating the concentration by three points makes the risk look bigger, the leverage look smaller, and the diversification challenge look harder than it actually is.

Why the correction keeps failing to stick

This is the third time our fact-checking process has flagged this claim. The corrected version goes out, and a month later the 75% figure reappears in a new piece of coverage. That pattern says something about how policy numbers move through the information supply chain.

Nobody is lying. The number just sounds right. It's round. It confirms the prior. And because the actual figure is still very high, 71.7% is a massive concentration by any standard, the incentive to check it is low. Why look up the real number when the fake one makes the same point?

Because precision changes the argument. If you're writing about Canada's export dependence and you say 75%, you're accidentally bundling $23 billion of trade to Europe, Asia, and everywhere else into the U.S. column. That's not a rounding error. That's mislabeling a tenth of non-U.S. exports as American.

What 71.7% actually tells us

The verified figure still describes a lopsided trading relationship. No other G7 country sends 70% of its exports to a single partner. The risk of disruption from tariffs, regulatory shifts, or cross-border friction is real, and it's large.

But it also means that 28.3% of Canadian exports, more than a quarter, go somewhere other than the United States. That's roughly $220 billion a year in trade with the EU, the U.K., China, Japan, Mexico, and dozens of smaller markets. Trade policy built on the assumption that Canada has no export base outside the U.S. is policy built on the wrong map.

The $3.6 billion in goods crossing the Canada-U.S. border every day gets most of the attention, and it should. But ignoring the other $1.0 billion in daily exports to the rest of the world because it doesn't fit the narrative of total dependence is a mistake in the opposite direction.

The number is 71.7%. It has been checked, it has been published, and it comes with a citation and a date. If you're going to write about Canadian export concentration, use it.