Bruce County Council is working to implement new procurement policies in light of American tariffs.
Council considered a suggested motion at a recent meeting that would request that the provincial and federal governments enable municipalities to better respond and mitigate the impacts of potential tariffs.
Bruce County Director of Government Relations Aaron Stauch explained county staff is working towards an advocacy approach.
“We are working towards developing an advocacy approach on tariffs that addresses needs that we have from the provincial and federal government,” he explained to council. “I think that these are emerging pieces they’ll be a continued place of monitoring for us.”
The Director of Corporate Services, Sam Dinsmore, is also working with the county’s procurement team to look at implementing Buy Local and Buy Canada in alignment with trade agreements.
During discussion of the proposed resolution, Councillor Jay Kirkland asked whether passing such a motion would then inadvertently shackle the county to it, or whether the county could still purchase or procure an item in the event tariffs were dropped without a long delay to reverse policies.
“I think what you will find is a very measured approach in what we’re implementing is to take at this point in time when there are still trade negotiations and those kinds of pieces going on,” replied Stauch. “It’s what’s within the scope of what we can do within trade negotiations and pieces like that. And it’s stuff that we can easily turn around and revert back to previous practices if that makes sense at that point in time. I think what we’ve tried to do is take a measured response with this situation.”
Through the late fall and early winter, Canadian federal and provincial officials engaged in diplomatic efforts to persuade American officials to avoid the use of tariffs. Despite these efforts, the U.S. announced a 25 per cent tariff on all imports from Canada and Mexico that do not meet United States-Mexico-Canada agreement rules of origin. Those American tariffs went into effect on March 4th. Canada responded with its own set of border taxes.
Warden Luke Charbonneau put his support behind the resolution, saying “I think that’s only a sensible thing for Canadians to do too and for Canadian governments like ours to do, so I would be supportive of this policy just as sort of an ongoing basis.”
Deputy Warden Don Murray also wondered how to best foster inter-provincial trade to give manufacturers and producers more markets to sell to, and proposed an amendment to the original motion, which was also carried.
