Trucks queue on the Peace Bridge, waiting to enter Buffalo, N.Y.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Major Canadian and U.S. textile companies are seeking relief from the Trump administration’s tariffs, arguing their industry is highly dependent on the free cross-border flow of materials to produce finished products, including gear for professionals such as police and oil and gas workers.
Three directors with the Canadian Textile Industry Association (CTIA) are currently in Washington to make their case for tariff-free trade. They’ve been invited by a sister association, the U.S. National Council of Textile Organizations, which is taking the lead on lobbying U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
“None of us want tariffs,” CTIA chair Jeff Ayoub said in an interview Tuesday, adding the textile sector in the United States, Canada and Mexico is highly interdependent today after a wave of jobs lost to offshore locations in recent decades.
“Those of us that are left manufacturing textiles in this hemisphere need the interconnectivity of the North American marketplace to be able to carry out our day-to-day activities.”
U.S. President Donald Trump is pursuing an erratic trade policy that has seen him impose tariffs, suspend some of them, and make new threats in an apparent bid to destabilize Canada’s economy. The textile industry’s lobby effort highlights the extent to which certain sectors of the economy are warning against breaking the tight multicountry webs they’ve woven.
Canada exports about $1.8-billion worth of textiles and apparel to the U.S. and Mexico every year, according to the CTIA. The U.S. is the destination for 64 per cent of those Canadian textile exports, which include high-quality flame-resistant materials and medical personal protective equipment.
The U.S. has paused blanket 25-per-cent tariffs on Canadian goods until April for imports that comply with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which includes most of the textile industry. But Mr. Trump is expected to announce additional “reciprocal” duties within days. Canada has retaliated with its own tariffs and threatened more if the U.S. doesn’t back down.
None of this is good for the roughly 800 companies in textile manufacturing in Canada, most of them small and medium-sized businesses located in Quebec and Ontario. Consider Monterey Textiles, a maker of technical fabric for protective clothing worn by firefighters, anti-riot police and oil and gas workers. It also supplies the Canadian Army.
The company, based in Drummondville, Que., is among the biggest fabric manufacturers in Canada, and around 80 per cent of its bulk sales are made in the American market. Monterey’s product is so specialized that some of its innovative weaving techniques are the only ones of their kind in the world, according to its website.
“There are certain fibers that we can’t get in Canada that we have to rely on the United States,” said Randy Williams, Monterey’s sales and marketing director, who’s also a CTIA board member. “Bringing that fiber across the border just to spin yarn would be affected price-wise with the tariffs.”
Textiles can cross the border several times before they become a finished product. As an example, fiber from the U.S. goes to Canada to be spun into yarn, and then back to the U.S. to begin a transformation into fabric. That fabric can then come back up to Canada to be processed and then go back to the U.S., and then potentially into Mexico for cutting and sewing, Mr. Ayoub explained.
Any levies will have an inflationary effect on the entire industry, and likely slow research and development spending, the CTIA predicts. The group wants a continuation of the USMCA agreement.
Textile companies in the three countries “really look to each other to support each other and find the resources within each country to be able to maintain businesses,” Mr. Williams said. “We’ve found the best in each country and kind of group that together.”