Malley Industries, a Moncton-based manufacturer of ambulances which ships up to 60 per cent of its output to the United States, is scrambling to mitigate the impact of the 25 per cent tariffs.
“The current generation of ambulances we produce are different to anything else in the market,” explained David Pargiter, an employee at Malley Industries. “We saw an opportunity about 10 years ago to expand our product line into the United States. Since then, we’ve worked with several dealers, and we’ve got six very active ones now who adopted our product, and it’s proven to be a reasonably popular differentiation to what they can get down there.
“A continued trade war doesn’t help anybody; it’s going to hurt. It really doesn’t help at the moment that everything’s changing every day. There’s uncertainty there. There’s a lot of people beginning to panic. We try not to do that.”
Malley Industries has a plan in place to address the situation.
“The primary thing is twofold,” Pargiter stated. “One is keeping our relationships with our U.S. partners, and I talk to them every day. The other one is protecting the jobs here and making sure that nobody goes home. We’ve got a short-term plan, a medium-term kind of a long-term plan that we’ll engage with all our stakeholders to make sure that we can mitigate the effects.”
The company’s U.S. clients are also grappling with the implications of the tariffs.
“There’s a lot of confusion,” Pargiter noted. “They really have very little idea of what tariffs mean for them. In many cases I’m educating my clients on exactly what it means. We supply some fairly large fleets on a regular basis. They don’t want competition coming in on that business.”
Malley Industries has no plans to absorb the 25 per cent tariff for its U.S. customers.
“Part of being in the U.S. market means that we have to use a lot of American content,” Pargiter explained. “If we can separate that out then we have a possibility to reduce the overall tariff effect. And if it reduces to say, five per cent, less than 10 per cent, that’s maybe something that we can talk to our clients about. Clearly at 25 per cent it’s a flat no.
“We can pivot. We’ve had to do that several times over the last few years for different reasons. What we can do in the short term is promoting Canadian vehicles, pause our American vehicles and catch up later.”
New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt acknowledged the challenge facing businesses in New Brunswick this week.
“As we see how it’s going to hurt businesses, if the tariffs are put in place or when and at what level, then we will build the response necessary,” she said. “We’ve got to support our workers, we’ve got to support our entrepreneurs. We’ve got to protect our economy and make sure that we are preserving and securing the economy of New Brunswick. We have to do that in a way that we can afford. That doesn’t dig us into a hole that we can’t get out of in the long term. So it is a balancing act.”
“We’re aware that both federal and provincial budgets are being prepared to help businesses who are affected by tariffs,” Pargiter said. “We’re trying our level best at the moment to make sure that we have our own plan, but we have our own contingencies. Beyond that, we really have no idea what that how might look, might look like. But we’ll be hoping to not have use it.”
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