‘It’s very stressful’: Moncton businesses struggle to keep up with tariff changes

U.S. tariffs are causing confusion for many Maritime businesses.

Sylvie Roy has owned Éclair Lips, a local business in Moncton, for the last 10 years and with a huge chunk of her clientele based in the United States, she is checking information on tariffs multiple times a day.

“I don’t know that there’s a way to prepare for it, but I think we want to be ready to turn on a dime if we need to,” she said. “Normally a government makes an announcement and there’s plenty of time to prepare, but now announcements are made and hours later they’re rescinded and something else happens. It’s very stressful.”

She runs the natural lip balm business with her husband and its their family’s main source of income. While most of her ingredients are sourced in Canada, there are a few that come from the United States.

“I’m very nervous about what’s going to happen mostly because of all of this uncertainty,” she said. “Normally U.S. customers can buy up to $800 duty free, but then on Feb. 2 they announced they did away with that and then a week later they reinstated it because they realized they didn’t have the resources to collect all of those tariffs, so we’re just waiting to see what will happen.”

Frank Bosse has been making custom signs and home décor with his company The Boss Factory since 2019 and says 95 per cent of his customers are based in the United States.

“Let’s say somebody’s in the States, well, usually they go on Etsy and buy, let’s say, our product, but basically now they might look locally in their region just to save that extra tariff,” he said. “Right now it doesn’t impact me because all the wood that I’m buying basically comes from Canada, but I know there’s a lot of transformation, like some of our wood is being sent to the States and getting transformed, like plywood and stuff, and getting shipped back here.”

He says he plans to keep communication open with clients and hopes clients continue to buy his products.

“If ever there’s somebody that comes to us and there’s a 25 per cent tariff, we’re going tell them, ‘Hey, sorry, there’s a 25 per cent added on the total price,’” he said. “Most customers will probably understand the situation because it’s Canada-U.S., it’s not only Canada to the U.S., but at the current moment, it’s still unpredictable.”

Window World, a window and doors sales company in the Greater Moncton area for decades now, only serves Canadian clients.

General manager and co-owner Sean Ryan says they work with two main manufactures in Atlantic Canada – one in New Brunswick and one in Nova Scotia – and while they mostly use Canadian sourced components, glass can only be bought in the United States.

“We saw an influx of clientele over the past couple of weeks with the uncertainty of when this was going to happen, so there’s obviously that influx because people want to get in before it does happen. We’ve had people call in just to see how that’s going to affect them,” he said. “I guess the message that we’re trying to send to our clients is, again, we don’t have control over these things, but what we will provide for your home is going to save you money for your home anyways so we’re trying to focus on that now more than anything.”

Ryan says there’s uncertainty across the board right now, but if tariffs end up impacting their products, the hope is to share the costs among manufacturers and leave clients out of it if possible.

“We’re the people on the front lines here making sure that if these tariffs do affect us that we’re either going to take the brunt of that for our client or at least have our information so that there’s no surprises for our clients,” he said. “Groceries, gas, power bills lately, they’re all rising and we don’t want to be another source of stress or pain when it comes to that type of thing with our clients.”

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