A man welds steel at Hunter Wire’s Winnipeg production facility on March 17, 2025.Shannon VanRaes/The Globe and Mail
In the world of North American hockey, Hunter Wire is virtually unknown, even if its steel structures are the foundation of thousands of skating pads in community rinks and National Hockey League arenas.
That’s given David Koss, the Winnipeg-based company’s president, a rink-side view to the discomfort and confusion that U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum are causing his American customers.
“We may be small in the grand scheme of things, but these are huge capital projects, whether they’re university rinks, community rinks or NHL arenas, and tariffs are impacting everything,” said Mr. Koss.
The result: higher prices for new and renovated arena projects, and the potential for a slowdown for his company.
Hunter Wire dominates a niche segment of skating pad construction known as rink chairs, steel-wire structures that support rebar and refrigeration pipes in the concrete floors of rinks. By Mr. Koss’s estimate, the company, which has been manufacturing rink chairs since the 1970s and has 18 employees, controls roughly 95 per cent of the North American market.
While the steel comes mostly from Canadian and some European mills – “U.S. steel has never been competitive,” he said – roughly 40 per cent of the 200 new or refurbished rink projects it will supply this year are south of the border.
David Koss, president of Hunter Wire, at the company’s Winnipeg production facility on March 17.Shannon VanRaes/The Globe and Mail
Unlike the steel and aluminum tariffs that the Trump administration hit Canada with in 2018, this time derivative steel products such as Hunter Wire’s rink chairs are subject to the 25-per-cent tariff.
Mr. Koss has known many of his U.S. customers, which include specialized arena contractors, for many years and said they are fuming over the trade war. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were Trump supporters, but they’re spitting sparks at the whole situation,” he said.
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So far, Hunter Wire hasn’t lost any business as a result of the tariffs, since the rink projects it’s working on now were started well before the White House launched its trade war.
It also helps that supplying rink chairs accounts for about one-third of Hunter Wire’s business, with the rest made up from providing custom steel and aluminum products such as fan guards and steel supports for vertical storage units to mostly Canadian customers.
But weakness in its rink-chair business would still hamper the company, he said: “It won’t be immediate, but I can definitely foresee a slowdown in that sector.”
To that end, Hunter Wire recently sent letters to all its U.S. customers offering a 10-per-cent “tariff-assistance discount” on items impacted by the steel tariffs for as long as they are in place.
By taking a shared-pain approach, the company is hoping to lessen the “tariff sting” that his customers face, said Mr. Koss. “It’s not something we have to do but it’s something we feel we should do to help our U.S. customers.”
The tariffs have been a wake-up call for the entire U.S. construction industry, including those that specialize in building sports facilities.
“These are really expensive venues to construct, so when you’re talking about adding 25-per-cent to the cost of raw materials, you can take a billion-dollar arena or stadium and make it a lot more expensive very quickly,” said J.C. Bradbury, a professor of economics at Kennesaw State University in Georgia who studies the business of professional sports.
“There are a lot of international relationships that go into American venues that people don’t understand exists.”
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Earlier this month, Racine County, a suburb of Milwaukee, halted plans for a new US$13-million indoor hockey, curling and figure-skating arena over concerns about rising construction costs. Around the same time, the city of Cloquet, Minn., acknowledged that the tariffs are expected to push up costs of a US$6-million hockey-arena project. Officials from both cities did not respond to interview requests.
Aside from pushing up costs for Hunter Wire’s U.S. customers, the trade war has disrupted its business in other ways.
Since the 1990s, the company has handled the importing process for its U.S. customers. But doing so requires it to register as the importer of record and that would leave Hunter Wire on the hook to pay the tariffs itself. As a result, it has had to withdraw that service.
What Mr. Koss wants most of all from the Trump administration is clarity.
“Everything is so fluid – ‘tariffs are on, they’re off, we’re going to hit this, now we’re not’ – but if you’re going to do it, just do it, then we can navigate that,” he said.
“It’s the constant uncertainty that keeps you up at night.”