Edison Motors president Chace Barber with the company’s hybrid truck, in Toronto, September, 2023. With business already reeling from U.S. tariffs, the company has now taken a hit to its steadiest source of revenue in recent months – vehicle parts and brand merchandise – due to the Canada Post strike.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
Chace Barber remembers when his biggest worry was U.S. tariffs.
The president of Edison Motors, an electric trucking business, set up the company’s first manufacturing and product testing site in January on a sprawling 300-acre property in Golden B.C., once the divisional headquarters for Canadian Pacific Railway. The location was perfect. The timing was not.
Within months, U.S. tariffs curtailed shipments south of the border, obliterating 50 per cent of the company’s client base. But it’s the recent Canada Post strike that’s pushed business to the brink by threatening their steadiest source of revenue in recent months: vehicle parts and brand merchandise.
“With the tariffs on vehicles, we can’t really sell any, and the sales we did have are looking like they may not go through,” said Mr. Barber, the company’s president.
Keeping the business afloat was merchandise: hard hats and mud flaps, branded T-shirts and hats emblazoned with cheeky slogans or names given to their top-selling truck, “Topsy”, sold across Canada.
“It was 80 per cent of our monthly revenue,” Mr. Barber said. “We have been crippled.”
The reliance on “merch,” Mr. Barber concedes, is somewhat unusual for a trucking firm. “We’re not a normal small business,” he said. But its importance is rooted in the company’s origins on social media.
Three years ago, Mr. Barber, a logging truck driver, went viral on TikTok lugging around classic truck frames – some dating as far back as 1962 – and kitting them out with diesel engines and electric motors to create hybrid electric trucks out of his parents’ backyard in Merritt. B.C.
The cars resemble something out of a Transformers movie with imposing hoods painted in matte-black or ultramarine. Sporting names like Carl and Topsy – the latter in honour of an elephant whose electrocution supposedly involved a company tied to the inventor Thomas Edison – the trucks and Mr. Barber amassed a sizable following online among trucker communities.
“There was huge fuel savings, an increase in power ability to do jobs they couldn’t before with the actual electrical power,” Mr. Barber said.
The company is making 12 trucks and prototypes, with six being readied for customers while hundreds of others have been contracted to clients, mostly in construction and mining. “Half in Canada, half in the U.S.,” Mr. Barber said.
The cash they collected in sales and crowdfunding – more than $5-million – was used to build a factory in the foothills of the Rockies in Golden. Staff was hired, expanding the team to 30 employees. “A lot of them packed out, moved,” Mr. Barber said.
But just weeks after opening the new facility, U.S. President Donald Trump slapped a 25-per-cent tariff on automobile imports followed by a 25-per-cent levy on heavy trucks in September. That’s in addition to a volley of U.S. tariffs and Canadian countertariffs on steel and aluminum, which are used in key vehicle components.
“Our supply chain got destroyed,” Mr. Barber said.
About half of the company’s vehicle parts come from the United States: frame rails, air brake parts, anti-lock braking system components, which have been subject to countertariffs here in Canada.
A single shipment of electrical connectors costing between $600 and $900 came with a $300 levy, chief operating officer Jacob Lafond said.
He estimated that 50 per cent of both supplies and sales were U.S.-dependent. “90 per cent gone,” he said.
A small boost for business came from the buy-Canadian movement sweeping the country. But when Canada’s postal workers went on strike late Thursday, it extinguished what little momentum remained. “We just keep getting hit left and right here,” Mr. Barber said.
Beyond using Canada Post to deliver branded hoodies and hard hats across the country, the company shipped vehicle parts to customers in Ontario.
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Switching to another carrier came at steep cost. “[They] seemed to increase their price to where we’re not really making a profit with the shipping,” Mr. Barber said.
July data from The Canadian Federation of Independent Business showed that four in five surveyed businesses use Canada Post, with many citing low cost and convenience. Among those, one in five considered Canada Post critical to their operations. Mr. Barber’s company is one such business.
For now, he’s done his best to keep business afloat, especially with many employees having relocated to Golden.
“We haven’t laid anyone off yet, but we’re gonna be looking at that,” he said. “A lot of the [merchandise] revenue was paying for the engineers’ salary – with Canada Post going down, we’ve lost that.”