CANADA Act Would Turn Section 301 Into a Mandate

A single-sector alcohol bill is easy to file under trade irritant. The durable feature of Representative Claudia Tenney's CANADA Act, introduced July 6 2026, is not the wine and spirits fight. It is what the bill would do to the Section 301 initiation decision. Per the sponsor's press release, the bill directs the United States Trade Representative to initiate a Section 301 investigation into Canadian provincial liquor board restrictions on American alcoholic beverages and to begin it within 30 days of enactment. That converts a step the statute normally leaves to executive judgment into a statutory command. The safer claim is not that Congress has never done this before, but that the visible mechanism is a named-dispute initiation command rather than the ordinary USTR-controlled initiation path.