A sweet Alberta product is suddenly turning a little more sour in the wake of stiff U.S. tariffs slapped on Canadian products.
Honey is one of the Alberta exports on which the U.S. has slapped a 50-per-cent tariff after trade talks between Canada and its largest trading partner broke down on Friday.
Other Canadian goods worth $28 billion affected by the tariffs that came into effect on Saturday also include several alcoholic beverages, hockey sticks and flower bulbs.
For Richard Ozero, the collapse of talks and the implementation of tariffs on the product he produces in Parkland County comes at an inopportune time as this is the time of year when his Good Morning Honey starts “to barrel up our honey and get it ready for sale.”
Alberta is Canada’s biggest honey exporter. About $6 million of it per year typically heads to the U.S. As one of the products now facing a 50-per-cent import tariff, fewer American customers are likely to buy Canadian.
“The Canadian honey has to go somewhere,” Ozero told CTV News Edmonton on Monday.
“If it’s backed up back into Canada, now we’re facing a glut of honey here, and that’s going to suppress prices if we can’t find other international buyers or encourage Canadian honey consumption.”
The head of the Alberta Beekeepers Commission says some businesses are expecting job losses, even closures, if this level of tariff lasts.
“This isn’t just a jobs impact or economic impact, it’s a food security impact,” Barbara McKenzie, the group’s executive director, said Monday. “Without the bee industry, we can actually see key crops also impacted.”
The tariffs are expected to affect about $1.5 billion of Alberta exports to the U.S., which Moshe Lander says is a relatively small piece of the province’s economic pie.
The Alberta-based economist with Montreal’s Concordia University told CTV News Edmonton on Monday that the province and neighbour Saskatchewan have “gotten off very, very lightly from the damage” the tariffs have done in Canada, with Ontario’s, Quebec’s and British Columbia’s automobile, steel, aluminum and forestry sectors bearing the brunt of them so far.
“The most important thing for an Alberta audience is that it’s not oil and gas,” Lander said. “That’s pretty much the sum total of the exercise. It’s not food, beef or cattle; those things continue to remain free from tariffs.”
Trump made further threats on Monday to expand the 50-per-cent tariffs starting Jan. 1 to all vehicles, auto parts and steel from Canada.
Prime Minister Mark Carney accused the U.S. on Saturday of trying to introduce last-minute changes to terms of the deal that he called “unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.”
Trade talks between Canada and the U.S. ended on Friday after weeks of intense talks, which produced little to no progress. Last month, the Trump administration threatened the 50-per-cent tariffs on several Canadian goods in response to what the president called discriminatory trade policies, namely provincial bans on U.S. alcohol, dairy supply management, and tariffs and quotas on certain U.S.-made vehicles.
Lander said the problem is that “the whole point of this exercise is to try to engineer a way back to free trade, not to engineer away from it, where more and more goods and services are getting caught up in tariffs.”
“It’s not necessarily the magnitude; it’s the direction that’s the problem,” he said.
The economist said he believes Trump seems to be focused on “things that can be produced, things that can be touched, things that are large in size and come out of factories.”
“The thought that, somehow, the U.S. can recapture these manufacturing opportunities that have long since left the U.S. and would otherwise never be coming back if not for these tariffs, that seems to be guiding his policy,” Lander said. “Oil and gas, though, infrastructure is built for Alberta oil and gas, not for what’s coming out of Texas or what comes out of Pennsylvania, so that’s why he’s gone easy on it.
“He needs the critical minerals that come out of Saskatchewan. He needs the potash, the potassium, and stuff like that that’s coming out of Saskatchewan for the agricultural sector. That’s why he’s leaving it alone, but the things that he thinks can be done in the U.S., he’s hitting hard.”
With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Jeremy Thompson
