Tariff talk has Grey-Bruce agricultural community facing uncertainty

Feb 05, 2025

A cloud of uncertainty hung over the Grey-Bruce agricultural community on Feb. 3, with an expected 25 per cent tariffs on all imports going from Canada into the U.S. set to take effect.

Late afternoon media reports said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had secured a 30-day reprieve from the tariffs, which were scheduled to take effect at midnight. The deal was reached over a border security package Canada planned to implement to curb fentanyl and illegal migrants from crossing the border from Canada into the U.S.

Earlier in the day, U.S. President Donald Trump announced he was pausing the planned new tariffs on Mexican goods for a month after a promise from that country’s president Claudia Sheinbaum to place 10,000 soldiers at the border to curb the flow of fentanyl and illegal migrants.

The seemingly constant changing dynamics of the situation had local agricultural leaders still unsure of how the region’s producers would be affected when, and if, the tariffs are implemented.

“We really don’t know the impact right at this point,” Bruce County Federation of Agriculture president Chris Cossitt said Monday morning. “We are bracing for something, but right at this time until they actually instate the tariffs, we are not sure what it is going to do.”

Grey County Federation of Agriculture president Keith Reid on Monday said it hard to say how producers would be impacted with so much uncertainty around what is going to happen.

“It is definitely on farmers’ minds, but there is so much up in the air right now,” Reid said the morning of Feb. 3. “We are already a tight margin industry and it is just going to put that much more pressure on.

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