After 142 years in business with rodent and packaging of rice and rice flour, Deinty Foods was on the reel.
The attack of demand for pre -cooked and flavored rice made for microwave baking suddenly raised the richness of the only Canadian rice mill.
The company has already modernized its factory in Windsor, Ontario, and planned to build a new plant across the Detroit border to meet the demand of American customers.
Now everything that was entered and the existence of a company is only.
The odds of Deinty Foods reflect a wider fall than a trade war that broke out between Canada and the United States. Again, the slight tariff measures of President Trump and Kanada for retaliation are caused by deep wounds to Canadian small and medium-sized companies, which are now facing the escalation of costs to move the goods over the border.
The food must pay 25 percent more to import rice from the United States and face the possibility of paying higher costs for exporting products to America if Mr. Trump follows more tariff threats.
“We are potentially watching a double hit that no company can endure,” said James Maitland, Dainty CEO. “Somehow we laughed when we heard that President Trump says it works so that people are forced to build in the US, we wanted to do it. But financially you crippled us.”
After hurrying about eight weeks in a rice bag across the border before Mr Trump imposed 25 percent of tariffs this month, Deinty briefly suspended sending goods to American food chains, which makes up 80 percent of his sales.
Given Mr. Trump’s capriciousness, Mr. Maitland said, there is no way to make plans with any confidence. If the US tariffs are transmitted at any time, he added: “This company does not become sustainable.”
Often working with small profit margins and thin financial pillows, fewer companies across Canada, such as Dainty, which has about 120 workers, are struggling to move through the backwards between the two countries due to tariffs.
Many are particularly difficult to hit by Canadian tariffs on American goods. Of the approximately 100,000 small and medium -sized companies that are part of the Canadian Federation of Independent Companies, almost half of the imports from the United States, according to Kelly Day, the president of the group, who said that only “uncertainty and economic influences of tariffs” was harmed.
Trump is expected to hit Canada with another circle of tariffs on April 2. The president has withdrawn more than 25 percent of Tariff to Canadian goods, but still imposing a significant number of exports, including steel and aluminum.
After decades of trading across the open border, smaller companies also lack expertise for deciphering the complexity of the tariff system, said Trevor Tomba, a trade economist at the University of Calgary, Alberti.
“Walmart will understand that,” he said. “They have people or they can hire people.” Small companies, he added, “They don’t have that opportunity.”
To date, Dainty has spent about $ 25,000 (about $ 17,300) to trade advisers and lawyers.
But that level of consumption is impossible for Jon and Liz Chan, a team of husband and wife who owns Wonder Pens, a Toronto printing press trade, and, like Dainy, both governments feel squeezed.
While Wonder Pens mainly relies on Canadian customers, Mr. Chan said that he cares that the Americans who buy from them will stop on the net if more tariffs are introduced and the cost of their goods increases. Canadian tariffs also meant a higher price for envelopes and other items that trade imports from the United States.
Mr. Chan said he also felt pain for the fall of Canadian dollar value, which is another victim of a trade battle, which resulted in higher prices for some products from abroad.
“We are just trying to get, we pay the bills and keep the employee employment,” said Mr. Chan of the store, which was open 12 years ago and has two full -time employees and five part -time employees next to him and his wife. “All this uncertainty is stressful.”
Just down the road from the main car factory in Windsor, it is discreetly marked on a store that Ron SIM, a cinema, turned into an optical design and a test center. It focuses primarily on making a kit that transforms the vintage lenses and still a camera for use on digital films cameras.
Mr. Sim has moved the production of precisely treated metal parts to which Mr. Trump’s affection for the tariffs is more relieved.
When Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on China during his first administration, Mr. Sim transferred production to Thailand.
Then, before last year’s presidential elections, Mr Sim said to think to himself, “This will get worse.” So, in order to try to protect the sale of the United States, the source of three quarters of his job, he brought his production home and opened a small factory in Harrow, an agricultural city south of Windsor.
It seems that the move may not save him from the US tariff.
“I never thought he would do it in Canada,” Mr. Sim said after a 25 percent tariff of 25 percent were briefly. “So that caught me for protection, especially after spending millions in machines and bringing production to Windsor.”
It is unclear that his customers in the United States – who include a large photographic seller in New York, will be reacting for several film equipment for film and optical houses, as well as Internet customers – to respond to all Tariffs returning on April 2. Said Mr. Sim. Vinsage lens conversions are competing with the increasingly cheaper and high quality new lens from China.
“I feel like I’m walking with this wire,” Mr. Sim said. “I’m just standing at the moment, maintaining balance and seeing where everything goes as much as I can.”
Throughout the city, a microwave package package in Dainty Foods, which replaced the aging of the line that made a canned rice, is located in a renovated, glittering space. But it is also half empty.
Workers there manually finished handbags that carry the names of American merchants, including Aldi, Walmart and Whole Foods. As part of the expansion and modernization, Deinty bought robots and wanted to add another production line.
But Mr. Maitland said that the company is not sure if he will move forward with his plans, since there is no clarity about what will happen to the existing tariffs or new ones I can come.
The mill asked the Canadian government to exclude its imports of rice from the tariff, but did not receive an answer. The Canadian Finance Department, which sets Tariff, did not respond to the commentary request.
“No one has a crystal ball,” Mr. Maitland said. “No one knows if this will be a few weeks, no one knows if it’s a few months or this is a new life. There’s no clear path.”
