The ongoing trade wars with the United States are taking a toll on many businesses.
Malley Industries in Dieppe builds ambulances and other medical equipment..
Owner and CEO Terry Malley was featured on this week’s Insights podcast with David Campbell and Don Mills.
He says he has meetings on this every couple of days, “How it’s going to impact us, I always say it depends. We never know from one day to the next what Trump will do. One thing is certain, there’s no certainty.”
He says they do a large business in the US, and their dealer network is really concerned.
“We spent a lot of time educating them that we don’t have intentions of raising the price for our vehicles. The tariff is something that’s being put in place by the Trump administration, and we’re suggesting that they talk to their congressmen or the senators to try to get that point across,” Malley adds.
Malley Industries does a lot of Canadian production, and he says his biggest concern is how reciprocal tariffs may impact that.
“Money from tariffs really feeds government coffers, but it doesn’t do much to keep prices stable. I know the government’s talking about programs for EI and for job sharing, stuff like that, but really, the goal is to keep our people working. They’re hard to get and a lot of training is involved, and we have no plans for layoffs anytime soon.”
He says the other issue they have is that a lot of the parts they use, including lighting and chassis, come from the United States. Malley says some of their medical equipment also goes into the US, but there’s no duty drawback, and they don’t get any credit.
“I was reading an interesting article about this whole thing, and they’re predicting this will go away. About a 70 per cent chance it’ll go away before the next month, maybe, or maybe another 10 per cent to go longer than that. But I’m hoping that calm heads will prevail. We rode out Trump the last time, but we’ll see how it plays out,” Malley stated.
RELATED: Terry Malley Leads One of Only Four Ambulance Manufacturers in Canada
