Vancouver’s business community is already feeling the uncertainty and the threat from U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs, whether they are coming in March or April.
Trump, who spoke to the media during the first meeting of his newly-appointed cabinet, was asked if he would consider pausing or stopping the tariffs given the border security measures recently put in place by both of the U.S.’s neighbours.
“I’m not stopping the tariffs,” Trump told reporters, adding that he was concerned about the fentanyl crisis facing the United States.
However, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was also present at the meeting, clarified that Trump was talking about two separate sets of tariffs.
The first is the fentanyl-related 25 per cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, which are set to hit on March 4. The second set of tariffs are reciprocal tariffs on all of America’s trading partners, which Trump said will go into effect on April 2.
“Even the uncertainty and the threat of tariffs has been incredibly disruptive,” Bridgitte Anderson, president and CEO of the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade told Global News.
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“Many of our members of the Board of Trade have talked about the kinds of impacts they’re seeing on their business. They’re doing scenario planning. That includes layoffs, a drop in revenue increase, and a lot of costs for those businesses.
“So whether the tariffs are coming in March or coming in April almost doesn’t matter, because the chaos right now for businesses has been significant.”
Anderson said businesses in B.C. and Canada need to prepare for this kind of disruption for the next four years as it will probably become the “new normal.”
“It is just so unpredictable what the Trump administration is going to do,” she said.
“And so it is prudent for all businesses to prepare for all kinds of scenarios.”
Anderson said they have laid out the next step of the plan to grow B.C.’s economy, whether the tariffs will be implemented or not.
One of the things to accomplish will be to remove internal trade barriers, which includes movement of people, Anderson explained.
“So doctors and nurses and health care professionals who can work in one province should be able to work in another,” she said.
“In British Columbia, insurance brokers have to get (a) new kind of licensing. The certification in other provinces comes to repackaging of goods that, you know, a lot of goods have to be repackaged in different provinces as well.”
Anderson added that they want B.C.’s wineries to be able to sell direct to consumers across Canada, which is not yet the case.
“So all of these together would start to unlock economic growth that we would see fairly immediately, at a time when our province really does need it, given the very sizeable deficit that we have and the crunch that we’re seeing coming due to the tariffs,” she said.
–with files from Global News’ Uday Rana
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