Late last August, Julia Hallman and her husband road-tripped from their home in Massachusetts to spend time with one of their Canadian suppliers at Fromagerie La Station in Quebec.
Hallman sat on the back porch at the farmstead in Compton and watched the grazing cows that would eventually provide the milk for one of her shop’s best-selling cheeses: the supple Alfred le Fermier. She’s determined to keep buying the cheese to sell at her shop not only because her customers love it, but also because she counts the family as her friends.
“At the end of the day, we want to help support them and get more money into their hands,” said Hallman, who owns Formaggio Kitchen, a specialty cheese and artisan goods shop in Cambridge.
Hallman is one of the innumerable businessowners in Canada and the U.S. waiting to hear whether the Trump administration will impose steep new levies on a long list of Canadian goods on Wednesday. Entrepreneurs south of the border say sustained, 50 per cent tariffs would force them to make the choice they’ve been trying to avoid for more than a year and a half: breaking away from longstanding, good-faith relationships with Canadian suppliers for the sake of their finances.
Imported products from cheeses to chocolates to spices and spreads account for roughly half of the stock at Formaggio Kitchen, with Canadian products making up roughly 15 per cent of those goods.
Hallman has managed tariffs on Canadian dairy in the past by sacrificing profit, raising prices for customers or both. She would like to continue that way, but says a rate of 50 per cent would eventually be too much to handle.
“There will come a point in time when we do have to make some hard choices,” she said in an interview on Monday. “That’s the challenge: we don’t want to sacrifice the friendships that we’ve made. But we also have a threshold of what we can handle as a business and what our customers are willing to pay.”
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Like Hallman, Sarah Paxton is worried the new rate will force her to move away from the suppliers her business has used in Ontario and Quebec for decades — one of which, Amisco, offered to meet her in the middle by covering the cost of tariffs until a certain date. She said she could manage the new fees herself for a while, but not forever.
“We’re going to try and continue if we can. Fifty per cent, though, that’s a pretty high number,” said Paxton, who co-owns a contemporary furniture store in Richmond, Va., called LaDIFF.
“If you can imagine somebody reaching into your wallet and taking half of what you’ve got, that would be pretty tough.”
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The latest round of U.S. tariffs are set to hit $28-billion worth of Canadian goods just after midnight unless the two governments come to a last-minute deal.
Canadian entrepreneurs are worried about tariffs taking a massive bite out of their profits if American buyers like Hallman and Paxton — the ones who ultimately pay the bill when they bring Canadian goods across the border — have to source elsewhere.
Representatives from Canada and the U.S. met on Monday for what was expected to be the final meeting at the ministerial level. The Prime Minister’s office confirmed to CBC News that Mark Carney spoke to U.S. President Donald Trump that afternoon about the “ongoing trade negotiations.”
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Waiting to see whether another threat would come to pass, Hallman stocked her shop’s basement “cheese cave” with as many non-perishable goods as she could before the deadline. The cost of tariffs, she said, is just as emotional as it is financial.
“We’re pretty stubborn,” said Hallman. “We bring these products in intentionally. We bring them in because we love them. We don’t want somebody to say, essentially, that we can’t import them. That’s what they’re doing by putting a tariff that egregious [in place.]”
“It’s a pretty loud and clear message.”
