While the tariffs could mean changes for the Paloma Clothing company, other American companies are facing the same battle they have faced since Trump returned to office and began imposing his levies.
Bill Easton, owner of Terre Rouge Wines in Plymouth, California, has been unable to ship his wine north to Canada for the past year and a half due to a boycott of US alcohol.
He is currently paying $2,400 a month to store that wine in a warehouse in the hope that he will one day be able to ship it to the Canadian markets he sells to.
“The wine has just gotten better in the warehouse, but I can’t expect my customer in Canada to pay that extra cost that I’ve assumed over the last year and a half as part of the price, if I was able to sell it tomorrow,” Easton told the BBC.
And then there are the American businesses impacted by proximity to the Canadian border.
The number of Canadian customers travelling across the border to shop at Heather Seevers’ craft shop, Northwest Yarns and Mercantile in Bellingham, Washington, has gone down some 20% since the tariff war began over a year ago. What has further irked Canadians has been Trump musing on Canada becoming a 51st US state.
The shop sits 25 minutes from the US-Canada border and since the “war” ensued Seevers said her business received emails from Canadian customers saying they could not patronise her business “due to anti-Canadian rhetoric”.
“We completely understood that,” she said.
But the combined impact of fewer customers and higher prices has left the shop asking for help from the community recently via a fundraising initiative to stay afloat.
And then, over the weekend, when the new tariffs struck, Seevers saw another hurdle appear.
“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” she said. “It’s going to take years and years and years to get a relationship back with Canada, and I think these new tariffs are digging us deeper into a hole.”
Additional reporting from Nadine Yousif
