FACES OF THE TRADE WAR

Donald Trump's trade war is an existential threat for Canada's small and medium-sized businesses. Every year, they export more than $200 billion worth of goods to the United States and import nearly $150 billion worth—including equipment, food, construction materials and other products they need to stay afloat. Now, as businesses contend with tariff-induced inflation, suppliers are disappearing, prices are skyrocketing and profit margins are shrinking or vanishing altogether. That puts small-business owners on the frontlines of the trade war. Here, five of them describe their hopes, fears and game plans as they navigate U.S. tariffs, Canadian countermeasures and an economic climate of unprecedented uncertainty.

- INTERVIEWS BY ANDREA YU

“Each can could be 10 cents more, which would cost us nearly $1 million”

BY BROMLYN BETHUNE, PRESIDENT, STEAM WHISTLE BREWING, TORONTO

EVERYONE IN THE BEER BUSINESS KNOWS that January and February are slow. But this year has been different. March arrived, and sales stayed low—in bars, in restaurants, in stores. In fact, they were lower. It’s obvious why: all the talk of tariffs and a looming recession has people worried, and discretionary spending has plunged.

A bigger hit came in mid-March, when Donald Trump's 25 per cent tariffs on aluminum imports came into effect. Eighty per cent of our beer sales come from 473-millilitre cans, or tallboys. The aluminum for the cans comes from Quebec, but there’s no Canadian manufacturer that can make the final product. Instead, Canadian aluminum is shipped to the U.S., turned into cans, and shipped back. With the new tariffs, each tallboy would cost us 10 cents more to produce—and we'll need 9.1 million tallboys in 2025. That’s nearly a million dollars we hadn’t budgeted for.

That’s not the only tariff hit we faced. A few years ago, we acquired another Ontario brewery called Beau’s, and some of their beers use styles of hops and malts that we don’t grow in Canada. We used to buy them from the U.S., but now we're looking in Canada and to Europe for alternative ingredients. That’s going to be costly, difficult and time-consuming. Developing and refining recipes takes months or more of trials and quality-assurance testing. You can’t just swap out one ingredient for another.