Minty Conant remembers the pride she felt when Caledonia Spirits' Vermont-made gin landed on shelves in Quebec. It was 2014, and the process had taken a lot of hard work from people on both sides of the border. The Montpelier-based company even created a French label for their products sold in Canada.
“We went the extra mile on that, and we gained a lot of trust, and people just love our product in Quebec,” she said.
Overnight, the decade-long relationship soured.
“The minute tariffs started, they pulled all of our product off the shelf,” Conant said. “It's sitting somewhere. We have an order that was placed last fall that's sitting on our dock.”
She doesn’t know when or if they’ll be back in Quebec, and said the economic effect on Caledonia Spirits was immediately felt.
Conant was one of the nearly two dozen business leaders and industry representatives that gathered Tuesday in Newport, just minutes from the border, to share the impacts of the Trump administration’s on-again-off-again threats of 25% tariffs on Canadian goods. The panel was organized by Sen. Peter Welch’s office.
“I want to speak bluntly, I am absolutely horrified by these tariffs,” Welch said. “I cannot think of why we would be having tariffs and getting into a tariff war with our best neighbor.”
The economic impacts of the budding trade war were front and center of the 90-minute-long panel and ran the gamut from higher costs to delaying investments to a decline in Canadian tourists.
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Denis Larue, who runs J.A. Larue Inc., a snowblower manufacturer based in Quebec, said the U.S. is a big market for their products. Parts that go into his machines, like engines, axles and carburetors, come from the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Every time any of those parts cross a border they could be subject to tariffs, which will drive up prices.
“This will kill our industry,” he said. “And will induce a very big pressure on the taxpayer in [the] U.S., because everything they're going to buy from us, they have to pay more.”
Les Morrison, owner of Morrison’s Custom Feeds, Inc., said when the tariffs were briefly fully in effect earlier this month, one truckload of soybean meal from Canada jumped $5,000 in price.
“We can't sustain that,” he said.
Kingdom Brewing owner Brian Cook imports his beer cans from Montreal, which are impacted by aluminum tariffs. A large portion of the brewery's business comes from Canadians, so much so that they wrote their menu in French last year. Right now, Canadians are staying away.
“We’ve seen a big decrease in sales,” he said.
Many said the hurt goes deeper than the economic uncertainty. Trump has repeatedly called now-former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “governor” of the “Great State of Canada.” He continues to call for the country to become the 51st member of the union.
“What's going on in Canada is without precedent,” said Marie-Claude Bibeau, a member of Parliament for Compton-Stanstead, an electoral district that sits on the border with Vermont and includes Sherbrooke, Quebec. “The threat is over and above tariffs right now, and I'm even a bit, a bit emotional when I say that, because it's a threat against our sovereignty. And if it was a joke the first 24 hours, it's not a joke anymore.”
Bibeau said she’s never seen Canadians so united. Grocery shopping, she said, takes longer because shoppers have to check each product to see if it’s made in America. If it is, they don’t buy it.
“And it just breaks our hearts,” she said. “I'm sure it won't last, but right now it hurts. It hurts really bad.”
Welch said he intends to do “every single thing” he can to push back, although it’s unclear what message might get through to the president. The senator said he is working closely with Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire on this issue.
Bibeau thanked Welch for his efforts and urged him to push forward.
“You Americans, you are the ones who can convince the president that this is not the right thing to do,” she said. “Not for the Americans, not for the Canadians.”
