HALTON HILLS - The nation is one day away from finding out whether U.S. President Donald Trump makes good on his threat to impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
Businesses and residents are bracing themselves for what many experts have warned will be price shocks in an already inflated consumer environment.
Months of presidential bellicose talk about turning Canada into the 51st state has only heightened concerns, leading local council to reaffirm the country's sovereignty just last week. Halton Hills and the country at large is once again facing an economic firestorm.
The last time that occurred was 16 years ago, under former mayor Rick Bonnette. Alarmed by the threats, he sees many parallels between the past and present scenarios.
In a recent Instagram post showing a “Made in Canada” tag, he called on everyone to, “look at the labels when shopping. Buy Canadian wherever you can.”
He continued: “Buy Canadian wines, vodkas, grocery products etc. This helps our Canadian businesses that provide Canadian jobs. Plus it supports our economy and labour while a convicted felon south of the border threatens Canada.”
In 2009, Bonnette found himself staring down the barrel of American policy just like Canada is today. In his case, his adversary was former president Barack Obama.
That year, the newly-minted American leader set about revitalizing the economy after the 2008 financial crisis devastated the US. He tabled the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which had a provision mandating working with American suppliers.
Obama’s policy was, to put it lightly, controversial in that era and drew both criticism and praise on both side of the border. But the Canadian business community began feeling the pinch almost immediately.
Halton Hills water pump manufacturer Hayward Gordon Ltd. was one such employer. At the time, three-quarters of its sales came from the US. In March of 2009, they raised the alarm about getting shut out of lucrative contracts in Maryland, leading them to consider moving to the US.
“They brought it to my office’s attention that they weren't getting any jobs in the States,” Bonnette said in recounting a meeting with Hayward Gordon. Bonnette also caught wind that a US military base in California ripped up a pipe because it said “Made in Canada” on it.
“So very petty,” Bonnette remarked. He and his council colleagues adopted a resolution of not working with any country that discriminated against Canada in response. If Bonnette had any illusions about his policy not going anywhere, they were shattered soon after.
As other municipalities got behind Halton Hills, both Canadian and American media attention was soon directed at Bonnette and his council. From big names like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post to lesser-known ones like Sly in the Morning - a radio show out of Oshkosh - Wisconsin, Bonnette was inundated with media requests.
“One was from a reporter with a Japanese newspaper at the White House. She had just finished hearing the president speak and called me up… I said, ‘a Japanese newspaper? Oh my God,’” he recalled.
His oft-repeated slogan in the media became, “it’s time we showed Canadian backbone and not Canadian back bacon.” He became the mayor who, according to one paper, “stood on guard for thee.”
In the spring, Councillor Clark Somerville brought forward a similar motion at that year’s Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) meeting. Canada’s municipalities formed a united front against the Obama administration.
“It really became lightning in a bottle and it was the biggest issue at that time that FCM had ever dealt with,” Somerville told HaltonHillsToday. “It ended up with FCM having an international trade committee with the Department of Foreign Affairs to go over any of these trade deals and how they affected the municipal level of government.”
By early 2010, it was clear the advocacy worked, as it managed to secure an exemption for Canadian firms. “I don’t think we could have done anything differently from what we did,” Bonnette said.
Here in 2025, Halton Hills is once again staring down the barrel of an economic threat. Current Mayor Ann Lawlor is finding that, in some ways, history may be repeating itself.
“It wasn’t even buy Canadian [in 2009]. It was fair trade, saying, ‘trade is good for both nations and let’s have fair trade between us.’ I think that is the very same message that Canadians and the federal and provincial governments are talking about today.”
Lawlor knows full well tariffs on Canadian goods will hurt. She sees the potential for the town’s industrial based along Armstrong and Steeles Avenues particularly getting affected by this.
"Our business is absolutely intertwined with the Americans. Corporate trade and so forth,” she said.
“More businesses than not will be affected.”
Grocery stores, service industries, tourism and travel, Lawlor has “little doubt that this is going to affect the residents of Halton Hills.”
“Municipally, I think that we have to be conscious, though, when we're developing our municipal budgets,” she said when asked how council was preparing for potential economic impacts.
"We could be looking at bigger bills for the kinds of things that we need in order to keep the municipality operating,” Lawlor warned.
“Property taxes are really the only measure that the municipality has to to influence costs for property owners and so forth. So we will be very, very conscious that we don't push businesses or homeowners kind of beyond what's reasonable.”