B.C. businesses hope Carney counter-tariffs can provide new opportunities for them

Baha Naemi, inside CanCorr, hopes targeted counter-tariffs will let his company take some of the B.C. market share that currently goes to U.S. imports. Photo by Arlen Redekop /PNG

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Hundreds of stunned B.C. businesses are scrambling to sort out how to adjust as the next round of on-again, off-again U.S. tariffs took hold over the weekend.

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“I thought this thing was going to be resolved Friday night and everything put to bed,” said Doug Pauze, president of Coastland Wood Industries.

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Canada was in last-ditch talks to head off a new round of U.S. tariffs on some $28 billion in Canadian exports.

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Instead, Pauze woke up Saturday in an escalating trade war with a 50-per-cent tariff target on the wood veneer that Coastland produces. With about 50 per cent of its product typically exported to the U.S., Coastland is left “taking contingency plans” as of Monday morning.

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Pauze said that means scaling back production by at least 50 per cent at company operations split between Nanaimo and Annacis Island in Delta. For now, he’ll will avoid layoffs among his 320 employees.

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What the industry needs from counter-tariffs, he added, is for Canada to put an equal focus on the same amount of competing wood products coming into Canada, because “there (are) no other market options.”

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“It’s the Canadian market where it’s going to be key.”

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Coastland’s exports are among the almost $1 billion a year in value-added wood products B.C. exports to the U.S., according to figures from industry analyst David Elstone in a publication for his firm the Spar Tree Group, making the small sector one of the most deeply affected.

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Trump levelled the tariffs under Section 338 of the Depression-era Smoot Hawley Tariff Act, accusing Canada of “discriminatory” trade practices.

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And just by dint of the schedule of exports they hit — including wine, agricultural products, wood products and furniture — B.C. has gone from being the least-affected province in Trump’s trade war to one of the most affected in this escalation, according to Cory Redekop, CEO of the Greater Langley Chamber of Commerce

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“The unique items on this list are now catching us,” Redekop said.

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“It’s tough,” Redekop said. “I’m talking to a few people in the (agriculture) space and the horticulture space — they’ve got greenhouses full of products that are on the tariff list.”

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The drill for those businesses now, he added, is to comb through their inventories to figure out which are on the list, and which ones have enough margin to maybe absorb continued shipments and which ones they’ll have to stop shipping.

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“And that is money and time and energy that ought to be spent on making that business more profitable and more innovative,” Redekop said. “And people (are) talking about what they want government to be doing, all because of some short-sighted, self-inflicted decisions coming out of the States.”