David Chartrand, Canadian General Vice-President of the IAM Union Canada, issued the following statement regarding the suspension of Canada-U.S. trade negotiations:
The federal government was right to end the talks and bring our negotiators home, because what was on the table would have locked in tariffs that serve no purpose other than leverage while requiring Canada to give up decisions that properly belong to Canadians. An agreement on those terms would have cost this country far more over the next decade than the fight we have now entered.
Our members build and maintain aircraft, move passengers and freight, and work across manufacturing and defence, which places them directly in the path of what is coming. Components in aerospace cross the border several times before an aircraft is finished, so a charge of this size does not land once and stop, it stacks up at every stage and reaches every worker along that chain. These tariffs are not paid by the people who designed them, they are paid by the workers whose hours get cut, by families already managing higher costs, and by communities that were built around a single plant or a single hangar.
There is a second cost that gets far less attention, and it is the uncertainty itself. A company deciding today where to place an aerospace or defence program is making a commitment that will last fifteen or twenty years, and when American trade policy shifts every few weeks, that work goes wherever the ground is more stable. Once a program leaves this country, it does not return within a business cycle.
We support the federal government’s decision to answer these measures in kind, but countermeasures on their own are not a plan for the people affected by them. Employment Insurance has to be easier to reach and it has to last long enough to carry workers through a disruption of this length, work-sharing and wage supports need to be expanded before temporary slowdowns turn into permanent layoffs, and any assistance flowing to employers should carry firm conditions that keep jobs and production in this country. This is also the moment to put federal procurement and defence spending to work at home, with guaranteed industrial benefits and with maintenance and overhaul performed by Canadian workers rather than sent south of the border.
The federal government cannot carry this alone. Provinces hold the levers that decide whether a targeted employer stays open through a difficult period, from payroll relief to training funds and the conditions attached to their own procurement, and they should be using them now rather than waiting to see how long this lasts. Aerospace and manufacturing work is concentrated in a small number of communities, and when a plant closes, it takes the supplier network around it down as well. Every level of government has a part in this, and workers will judge all of them on whether help arrives while jobs can still be saved.
Our members are prepared for a difficult period ahead, and we expect a response that measures up to what they are being asked to carry. The IAM will keep making that case to the federal government until it does.
