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<\/p>\n\u201cWe cut back both personally and in here when this all started about a year ago,\u201d Haley said. \u201cWe made some choices but we still purchased the things that we absolutely could not source here. Now, we will be making those changes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t<\/p>\n
Easier said than done though as Haley said sourcing lettuce during the winter months might be difficult as it used to come from the U.S.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m hoping the lovely people at Desert Hills will be able to help me because they import a lot of produce from Mexico,\u201d she said. \u201cShort of that, I\u2019ve got some growing lights and some shelves.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m really glad about the inter-provincial barriers coming down because I think that\u2019s going to make it a lot easier for us to get grocery products and other staples from across the country.\u201d<\/p>\n
These are the kinds of thoughts that the Kamloops and District Chamber of Commerce wants to hear about. It has launched a new survey asking all Kamloops businesses \u2013 not just Chamber members \u2013 about the impacts they\u2019re facing because of American tariff hikes<\/a> as well as Canada\u2019s retaliatory tariffs<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cSome will be losing customers from the United States and some their suppliers will be increasing costs of their products,\u201d Chamber executive director Acacia Pangilinan said. \u201cMany \u2013 because of all of this tariff turmoil \u2013 have already starting looking for other markets.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis might be expediting some of that work.\u201d<\/p>\n That is already the case at Erwin\u2019s as their savoury pies are now sold without aluminum pie plates.<\/p>\n \u201cThose pie plates went up nearly 300 per cent last spring with those tariffs,\u201d Haley said. \u201cI can\u2019t even imagine what we\u2019re going to be hit with over the next few weeks. I was able to source the 8-inch pie plates for our dessert pies but they\u2019re about three and a half times more that what we were paying.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis is just another test of our business community\u2019s resiliency,\u201d Pangilinan added. \u201cBut, they know how to adapt and they know how to figure things out, but it\u2019s just another test of their will.\u201d<\/p>\n While buying Canadian is often more expensive, Haley said given the current political climate reaching over the border to buy cheaper American products isn\u2019t worth it any more.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s going to take a long, long time for me to feel confident ordering from the States again,\u201d she lamented. \u201cThe trust is definitely gone. Now what drives all of those decisions is whether I source everything here in Canada and even better, in B.C.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe States was our best trading partner. To me, it was an extension of Canada [but] you can\u2019t just attack a relationship and then expect it to bounce back instantaneously.\u201d<\/p>\n The Kamloops Chamber\u2019s survey was launched on Tuesday (Aug. 25), and Pangilinan said the findings will help inform strategies at both the B.C. and the Canadian chambers of commerce around not just impacts to businesses but also possible government supports.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re working really closely with them right now, and they\u2019re at those tables this week and today like its happening in real time,\u201d Pangilinan said. \u201cThe more feedback we could get, the more we can have Kamloops voices as part of those discussions.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBusinesses like ours where some of the spending is discretionary are definitely going to be impacted, just from the uncertainty,\u201d Haley added. \u201cPeople are going to be nervous, they\u2019re going to be scared, and we\u2019re in the same boat.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFingers crossed it all works out, because it\u2019s going to be interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWe cut back both personally and in here when this all started about a year ago,\u201d Haley said.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":874336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[45,49,48,46],"class_list":["post-874335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=874335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/874336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=874335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=874335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=874335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}