Krysten Lawton, 53, works at Ford Motor Company, a Canadian engine factory in Windsor, Ontario, on a small block from the Detroit River. She has been working for 30 years.
Lawton is a fourth-generation auto worker in Windsor, an industrial hub that takes Canada’s US border near Detroit.
Her great grandfather, both grandfather and father, all worked at Ford. Ford hires her, her husband and her eldest son.
“These are really good paying jobs,” Lawton said of the factory. She is currently working in health and safety.
“This is about changing lives for people to work here.”
Windsor employs more people to hire manufacturing than any other sector. This is 19% of that workforce. These workers and employers in Industrial Heartland, Canada, are currently rattling with the threat of tariffs.
In March, US President Donald Trump imposed a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum, and was similarly imposed on cars a few weeks later. In June he doubled his steel and aluminum duties. And now he is threatening to tax copper at 50% from Friday.
This is Trump’s deadline for Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to reach a 35% tariff on all goods deemed not to comply with the 2020 US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
Last Friday, Trump threw cold water at his hopes of Canadians’ respite.
“Canada may just be Canada paying tariffs,” Trump said. “It’s not really a negotiation.”
Faced with the same deadline, the European Union agreed on Sunday to accept 15% missions for most European exports.
Long-standingly interconnected US and Canadian manufacturers have endured the worst, just like industry-dependent communities.
“Volatility continues to be a new certainty,” said Alex Greco, senior director of manufacturing at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.
Loss of confidence
At Trump’s first tariff, Lawton’s colleagues had “all edges,” she says.
Her factory manufactures engines for U.S. states in Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan, with some components being sourced globally.
“It definitely has a real human impact,” she said, “especially in our area… all Canadian manufacturing hubs.”
The Canadian manufacturer employs 1.7 million people, exceeding one-tenth of gross domestic product, and last year exported $356 billion in Canadian dollars (US $257 billion) of goods to the United States, linking 530,000 manufacturing directly to exports.
Of this, passenger cars and parts account for $62 billion ($45 billion), exceeding 30,000 direct export-dependent employment. Canada exported $13 billion ($9 billion) of domestically produced aluminum (nearly 10,000 jobs) and $8.4 billion of Canadian dollars ($6 billion) of steel and iron, and about 6,000 jobs.
Trump’s volatile approach “creates cold in overall investment” and Greco has frozen many businesses’ expansion plans, saying it “erodes trust in cross-border supply chains.”
Official data is slower to the impact of work. However, thousands have already been fired this year by the automotive and metals industry as a whole.
Canada’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell in April, and is “already a major impact” mainly in the manufacturing industry, says the Centre for Future Work Director and Economist Jim Stanford.
“Uncertainty about the tariffs itself, and perhaps more importantly, tariffs, is undoubtedly hitting the house,” he said.
Trump’s tariff whim has sparked unease among workers, employers and voters. Only 11% of them believe Trump is negotiating in “honesty.”
But despite the layoffs and slowdowns, the damage could be even worse, said Katherine Connelly, director of the Centre for Employment Research and Research at McMaster University.
Without major layoffs and changes in inflation, employment is indeed increasing.
A business professor in Hamilton, Ontario said: “But it’s starting to look like we have some kind of tariff.
“No business wanted anything like this.”
If tariffs remain, the auto sector will “sting”
Automobile plants by the Michigan border have become increasingly intertwined since the 1965 Canadian-US Automobile Agreement.
“We had 60 years of integration,” said Julian Vikan Carragey, a lecturer in economics at McGill University who worked for Canada’s Treasury on trade issues, including the US Embassy in Canada.
“If these tariffs are maintained, it will hurt.”
Unifor’s Auto Industry Council chair John D’Agnolo noted that workers are worried.
“That’s scary,” said a longtime Ford employee and union member. “They are worried.
“They have to be able to take care of their families.”
Greco said the industry’s slowdown would “spread” across auto-dependent regions.
“Companies will have to make very tough decisions,” he said. “There is still a potential threat of recession.”
According to experts, silver lining is an exemption from parts made in North America.
“In theory, US tariffs on cars are supposed to adjust US content within cars,” Stanford said. “But in reality… the industry is just scratching its head.”
“The Effects of Cascades”
Even for USMCA-compliant automotive components, tariffs on automotive live metals have a “cascade effect,” Greco said.
A quarter of imported US steel is Canadian, more than half of imported aluminum.
In Ontario, the “heart” of the Canadian metals industry, one region hosts a third of the workforce in the local sector.
The peninsula around Hamilton, Canada’s “steel capital,” employs nearly 12,000 people to manufacture metals.
“Hamiltonian in particular is worried about steel. It’s a huge industry,” Connery said. “Companies, they are very resilient.
“But no one thought this would happen. That’s certainly a pretty shock.”
United steel workers represent tens of thousands of metal workers. Canada’s National Union Director Marty Warren warns that “many things are at stake” for members who produce products “from birth until the last day of casso.”
Tariffs have many members fear their future in “supporting the community” and “large pay jobs.”
“It definitely caused panic,” he pointed out. “There’s fear about the entire membership: ‘Should I save money in dark times?’
On July 16, Carney imposed his own steel tariffs on several countries to “ensure that Canadian steel producers are more competitive.”
The union hopes that the Canadian Prime Minister will do more to protect the domestic industry.
“At the end of the day,” Warren said, “What country does it have no steel industry in the country?”
The divided labor movement
One Thorn in Canada’s highly organized manufacturing sector: Some U.S. labor leaders support Trump’s “America-First” economic agenda. United’s auto workers head supported “recovering American employment.”
“Are we shocked by that?” asked Dagnoro. “Of course, we work well together.”
Ford employee Lawton calls tariff leaders “chameleons” because of their changing stance on Trump.
“There are people in the union who will support him one day and support him the next day,” she said. “In reality, it will have a much greater impact on the US than it affects us.
Lawton snooked with the idea that American work went to Canada, where Ford opened the factory in 1905.
“We’ve never taken American jobs,” she said. “But when you hear it over and over again, you start to believe it.”
Trump exploited a “great sense of betrayal” among blue-collar Americans after decades of manufacturing decline, Karagus claims. “It’s not clear that he can be involved in the way he returns to America, a large manufacturer,” he said. “Shortcuts rarely work.”
“You have to be able to bounce back.”
The Carragee faction worked for Kearney in the Canadian finance department before heading the Bank of Canada.
He considers Carney “very smart economically, politically and strategically,” despite “he deals with very hard cards.”
Kearney needs to compromise, but does not sacrifice any way.
“If we want to remain a sovereign state,” the Karagusians said, “We need to draw a line in the sand.”
Polls show that two-thirds of Canadians want Carney to “take a difficult approach and reject difficult concessions.”
In Windsor, which is auto-dependent, Lawton calls manufacturing a “roller coaster.”
“I’ll buy my first house and think about starting a family, then bang out – you get a layoff,” she recalls.
She is the most concerned for young workers. Due to the weather manufacturing storm, she encourages children to diversify their skills and does not rely on one income stream.
She gave Carney the same advice.
“You have to be able to bounce back,” she said. “The car is on a roller coaster, so it’s not what I want from a boy.
“I always say to them, ‘You’re your penny, your man, you just don’t know, so I had to save you.”
