Derrick Cleveland’s livelihood depends as much on thousands of workers in Canada as it does on the 100 colleagues he works shoulder to shoulder with at the Welded Tube mill in Lackawanna, New York.
Cleveland and the other Lackawanna workers, all members of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 00277, import steel from a Stelco plant in Nanticoke, Ontario, about 70 miles from their mill.
They use that steel to manufacture highly durable pipe, which they send back across the border—to a Welded Tube complex in Welland, Ontario, about 30 miles away—for further processing. The finished product crosses the border once more when it’s shipped to customers in the US.
This kind of supply chain underscores the deeply ingrained economic ties between the US and Canada. It also shows the pure folly of picking a trade fight with our northern neighbor, one certain to harm US workers, industries, and communities as much as it does Canada’s.
Slapping sky-high tariffs on the Canadians, trusted trade partners as invested in our prosperity as we’ve long been in theirs, makes no sense. It’s self-sabotage. We might as well be declaring war on Poughkeepsie.
“I consider them good people,” Cleveland, Local 00277 vice president and a utility operator at the Lackawanna mill, said of the Canadians. “We share the same values. We want the same things.”
“We’re two peas in a pod,” agreed John Manfre, president of USW Local 8328, which represents hundreds of workers at Welded Tube in Canada.
“They’re our cousins. They’re our friends. They’re our neighbors,” Manfre said of Americans. “They come to us in time of need, and we do likewise.”
America is Canada’s biggest trading partner, and the US exports more to Canada than to any other country—a mutual dependence that results in billions in goods traversing the border each day.
Workers make the hop as well, with Americans in border areas working in Canada and Canadians making similar commutes to jobs in cities like Detroit and Buffalo. Unions help to unify workers in both countries, with the USW representing thousands just between Stelco and Welded Tube’s Canadian operations.
Americans and Canadians also collaborate on job creation, as the 13-year-old, 45-acre Lackawanna mill demonstrates. Welded Tube built it on a former Bethlehem Steel site after New York economic development agencies and local officials, seeing the benefits to communities on both sides of the border, came through with a package of incentives.
Despite all the reasons the two countries have to continue cooperating, we’re engaged in internecine conflict that’s all but certain to hurt everyone.
America imposed 50 percent tariffs in August on hundreds of Canadian goods, marking yet another escalation in the Trump administration’s targeting of Canada. Tariffs are taxes on imports, and many products stand to be hit multiple times as components travel back and forth across the border amid production and assembly, highlighting the financial shock in the making.
Canada retaliated dollar for dollar, announcing its own set of tariffs on hundreds of US goods. They took effect September 8.
Used judiciously, tariffs help to level the playing field against China and other countries that habitually unload products at below-market rates or otherwise violate trade rules.
But it’s harmful to turn tariffs against allies, especially one with an economy inextricably linked to our own. That’s because the supply chain disruptions and added costs inevitably push some businesses to the brink, triggering production slowdowns, layoffs, and job losses in both nations.
“What he’s doing to us, he’s doing to his own people,” Manfre, the Local 8328 president in Canada, observed of Trump. “It’s a shame.”
