Highlights from the Canadian Chamber’s Manufacturing and Supply Chains Mission to Washington, D.C.

March 31, 2025

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On March 5, the Canadian Chamber team arrived in Washington, D.C., for our first trade mission of the year — the day after U.S. tariffs on Canadian imports landed.

Over the next two days, our team, alongside a delegation of more than 40 business leaders representing sectors across North America, engaged in conversations with D.C. public policy leaders. During the mission, attendees detailed commodity-specific implications of growing U.S.-Canada trade tensions while also unanimously agreeing on the most important takeaway: tariffs detrimentally impact the movement of goods across the U.S.-Canada border and leave both economies increasingly worse off as this trade war persists.

Our message was clear: the Canada-U.S. trading relationship is built on a long-standing — and still growing — foundation of integrated supply chains that enable the fluid movement of goods. This integration was established with great care and consideration over many years to secure our joint economic future; it will only be untangled at immense expense and over a long period of time, during which we are certain to relinquish our global economic standing to our competitors.

Highlights of the mission included:

A reception with Members of Parliament and Senators comprising the Canada-United States Inter-Parliamentary Group who were in Washington for meetings with American legislators as part of their Congressional visit.

A conversation at the Embassy of Canada to the United States, which provided a boots-on-the-ground Canadian perspective on the shifting landscape around Capitol Hill over the past few months and how trade has been affected.

A look at shifts in the U.S. policy agenda and our economic relationship with our largest trading partner and closest ally, presented by Export Development Canada and hosted at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center.

A discussion on what’s next for North American manufacturing between Alice Stayton Clark (United States Council for International Business), Paul Dostaler (BDO), and Diego Marroquin Bitar (Wilson Center), with opening remarks provided by David Patterson, the Government of Ontario’s Representative in Washington.

A panel considering how tariffs, technology and labour will shape the future of not only our highly integrated cross-border supply chains, but of global movement of both goods and people going forward.

A U.S. perspective on supply chain security and how tariffs continue to put economic growth at risk on both sides of the border, hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with views from Anne McKinney, John Drake, and Trey Mckenzie, as well as insights from Kelly Ann Shaw (Hogan Lovells).

With so many great discussions, it is difficult to boil everything down to just a few points, but our key takeaways are:

1. Tariffs are taxes. And that goes for both Canadians and Americans, who have watched markets adjust to tariff announcements in recent weeks and subsequently seen stock prices plummet. As trade becomes more expensive, costs rise for businesses, the economy suffers, and consumers pay the price.
2. Volatility is the new normal. The Trump administration’s trade strategy has been to leverage executive authority, citing national security, to undermine existing trade agreements. Pair this with multiple instances of unprompted shifts to tariff imposition timelines and it appears the only certainty going forward is uncertainty.
3. Businesses need to prepare. We saw many businesses front-load shipments in anticipation of tariffs, but lack of predictability and difficulty in sourcing alternatives remains a problem. Upending the integrated supply chains that have been established over decades of cross-border trade — and created economic prosperity for both countries — means all will have to either pay the toll or find more expensive options.
4. Manufacturing is extremely vulnerable. Imposing tariffs on intermediate inputs used to produce final goods puts many businesses at risk. The auto sector provides a glaring example of how costs can rapidly escalate — since components for motor vehicles cross the border multiple times before final assembly, taxes would be added at multiple points as well.
5. There is much more to be done. With tools like the Canada-U.S. Trade Tracker, the U.S. Tariff Exposure Index, and the U.S. Cities Most Export-Dependent on Canada providing data about regional impacts, there is a solid foundation for discussions with U.S. policymakers. That said, we still need to provide a better understanding of how North American supply chains operate and how Canadian inputs effectively complement American production and vice-versa.

Now more than ever, it is critical to have Canadian voices in Washington, making the case for the benefits of a trade partnership operating on a foundation of reliable and efficient supply chains. Thank you to all the businesses leaders who joined us on this trip and so passionately represented the interests of their industries from sectors and regions across Canada.

Thank you to our sponsors and partners for making this mission possible.

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You can learn more about our upcoming U.S. missions on our Events page: