August was supposed to tell the story of how our manufacturers are expanding their business horizons. Instead, it closes on news that makes the case for that work even more urgent. On August 21, Prime Minister Carney suspended trade negotiations with Washington, calling last-minute U.S. changes unfair and incompatible with the reliability of any eventual deal. The very next day, at 12:01 a.m., the United States reinstated 50% tariffs on roughly 28 billion dollars in Canadian exports, following a three-day reprieve from the originally planned date. On August 25, Ottawa spelled out its response: 27.6 billion dollars in counter-tariffs at matching rates (dollar for dollar), taking effect September 8, alongside 7.5 billion dollars in new support for affected workers and businesses. And this morning, Quebec's provincial election campaign opened in turn, ahead of an October 5 vote, with the trade war already named as one of the campaign's central issues.
We know these numbers and political timelines don't say much about what this actually means for a manufacturing SME that has to revisit its pricing, reassure a client, or simply wait to know which way to turn. Manufacturing accounts for 12.4% of Quebec's GDP, 86% of its exports and more than 500,000 jobs across roughly 13,600 companies. That's not an abstraction, those are teams, orders and decisions being made this week.
What we explored together this month
CVDM can't change tariffs or election calendars. What we can do is keep equipping our members to depend a little less on a single market, a single client or a single supplier. That was already the thread running through the month before the news made it more urgent still.
We started by naming the warning signs (reordering out of habit rather than strategy, relying on a single source for a critical input, getting caught off guard by a price increase), drawing on homegrown cases like Cuisi-n-art in Gatineau or Moderco in Boucherville, who learned the value of diversifying early the hard way. We then gave the floor to Concerti, a CVDM member at the Maillage tier based in La Prairie, where president Benoit Gagnon reminded us that a project unfolds in stages and that the point is to adapt the game plan to each client's reality, especially in times of trade uncertainty. And we launched a new way to find our members online, through a semantic search that makes matchmaking a little more intuitive.
Good news all the same
In the middle of a heavier news cycle, there's one piece of news we wanted to highlight. Corporate Connections has started telling its members about a closer connection with the CVDM ecosystem, one more association choosing to bet on connection rather than isolation. We'll have more to share in the coming weeks, but wanted to flag it as one of the month's highlights.
We still believe that in uncertain times, the relationships built before a crisis are what make the difference afterward. Our partner associations, Créneau Machines, Alliance Métal Québec and RTMQ, prove that every day, as do our members who choose to build connections rather than wait it out.
Photo: Unsplash / Andy Li
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