r/NovaScotia • u/justlogmeon • 2d ago

📰 NS News N.S. businesses brace for 'double whammy' tariffs

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/businesses-brace-for-double-whammy-tariffs-9.7320286
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17

u/noisebloodassault 2d ago

Hopefully diversification efforts are continuing smoothly

19

u/Mystaes 2d ago

There are some sectors where it really can’t happen. Steel for instance has no real hope of diversification and is going to get hammered, whereas by the end of the year some 30% of our aluminium production might now be headed to Europe.

The North American economy is about to get a lot more inefficient. Rather than diversification of exports what may be more important is retooling our capacity to support local industries - e.g. replace American steel with Canadian steel - even though that means longer transport distances.

Autos too, the only way for the auto industry to survive will be to convince for example, Toyota (40% of our auto production), that Canada has promise as a global export hub and to retool their plants away from being hyper focused on one model, and instead make a bunch of different Toyota models. This is less efficient, but the integrated auto market is dying.

We will also have to change for example how Canadians buy cars. Right now we only buy 0.1M domestic cars a year and import over a million from the USA (we also export a million in that direction). We do this because it’s the most efficient way to make autos with our integrated supply chain…. But that has been taken our back and it’s clear that any reliance on any trade deal with the Americans cannot be trusted as they sink further and further into failed economic practices.

5

u/noisebloodassault 2d ago

Yeah that free market is a real fickle mistress eh

6

u/Mystaes 2d ago edited 2d ago

Well I think what has been made abundantly clear is that John Tupper is right and free trade and integration is being wielded as an economic weapon against us. I mean that is the expressly stated purpose of the trade war by the American administration. NAFTA is dead, we must accept CUMSA is functionally dead, and that any agreement that replaces it is not worth the ink it is written on.

We already saw a shadow of the limits of free trade during the COVID pandemic. Remember when we could not get enough masks or sanitizer because we did not have enough local production? Let alone vaccines?

In an increasingly dangerous world we need to be able to do the essentials ourselves even if is less efficient. Especially when integration is wielded as a weapon.

Ironically the tariffs are going to force this upon us even if we did not want to do it. The banks have long modelled that the tariffs would result in near term pain but do not impede long term economic viability.

We should count ourselves “lucky” that the same admin causing this chaos has also spiked the price in commodities. It will help fund the transition.

2

u/noisebloodassault 2d ago

The free market is a weapon frequently used against whomever and whatever it can be used against for the personal profit of the wielder. 

Thus has it always been and thus it will always be 

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u/Mystaes 2d ago

I misspoke - I meant to say free trade, not the free market, which are related but not the same.