Alarm bells are beginning to sound as Donald Trump’s tariff deadline approaches. No deal by 12:01 a.m. Wednesday means a 50 per cent levy on a host of Canadian-made items, from automobiles to forest products “This is especially tough, especially for western Nova Scotia because we’ve got so much pine,” says Breck Stuart, general manager of Westfor Management Inc., a company that oversees Crown land in Nova Scotia. About 30 per cent of which goes to the United States with a value of $20 to $30 million a year. If that’s lost, hundreds of jobs will go with it. “So, we need to defend Canada, our Canadian market the same way the U.S. is defending their own market. We need to impose tariffs on other countries that are selling into Canada,” Stuart says. With Prime Minister Mark Carney talking with President Donald Trump Tuesday, there is hope a trade deal can be reached and tariffs avoided. Candle maker Jessica Douglas is hopeful a favourable agreement could reopen the American market that was closed after an earlier round of tariffs. “We immediately stopped shipping to the U.S. and we lost about 10 per cent of our website sales,” she says. “We’d be really happy to be able to open sales up to the U.S. again. We’ve got a lot of customers that have been asking us and we feel really sad to be disappointing a lot of people.” If midnight strikes without pen being put to paper on a deal, political science professor Lorn Sheehan says people shouldn’t panic and that it’ll only be a matter of time before both sides work something out. “Whether or not it’s signed tonight or it’s signed in the near future, you just have to think that with $20 billion plus at stake in terms of trade value, it really benefits both countries, it’s in both countries interest to work this out,” Sheehan says.
