Calgary Chamber of Commerce CEO and president Deborah Yedlin speaks with Alberta Primetime host Michael Higgins about how Canada could limit the impact of U.S. tariffs and strengthen the economy.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length
Michael Higgins: What makes this the inflection point, which, coincidentally is the name of your document?
Deborah Yedlin: The inflection point really is where we’re at, from an economic standpoint, in this country as a result of what President Trump wants to impose on Canada’s steel exports, aluminum exports, energy exports.
What we’re talking about is, how do we look inward to strengthen the infrastructure, to eliminate interprovincial trade barriers, to make sure that we’re competitive from a tax standpoint, while also looking to strengthen our ties with other markets? Because that’s clearly what we need to do.
MH: Why do you feel it’s taken the chaos and uncertainty triggered by the Trump tariff threats to motivate a conversation like this?
DY: This has been a conversation for as long as I can remember. In fact, if you read Peter Lougheed speeches from the 1970s, he talked about how we needed to diversify our economy, so this is something we’ve talked about. We’ve nibbled around the edges, but now this is something that has really come to the forefront because of our reliance on the U.S. as an export market. We really need to change that paradigm.
It has obviously caused a lot of different conversations to start happening, but these conversations should have happened, I would argue, 20 years ago.
MH: Are there made-in-Alberta solutions that could be applied here? What’s the road map your chamber is putting forward?
DY: What we’re talking about is everything from decreasing the red tape and regulatory burden to increasing the interprovincial trade. We are talking about how we need to support entrepreneurs and innovators to be able to grow their companies and their ideas in Canada, talking about building strong communities, which means investing in infrastructure. We want to strengthen the talent in the workforce that we have, and that means investing in education.
MH: What does the business community need to better thrive, better survive, and be successful in that kind of environment?
DY: We need our business community to have access to labour, access to capital, to have a competitive tax rate, to be able to expand as they can within the markets that they’re serving, and we need that regulatory burden and the red tape to be eliminated.
When you think about the fact that you can’t access certain professionals from across the country because of the accreditation challenges, when you think about the interprovincial trade barriers that exist and make it hard for you to import wine from Ontario into Alberta, there’s so many things that we don’t help ourselves, and it’s time that we actually look inward to eliminate those barriers.
The infrastructure conversation: let’s look about trade corridors, infrastructure corridors. Let’s talk about reviving Energy East so we can get oil from west to east and not have to go to the United States. Let’s talk about diversifying markets.
We heard from the Prime Minister that there was no business case for LNG, that conversation has changed. There absolutely is a business case for LNG to Europe and to Japan and South Korea. So let’s make that happen. Let’s increase that capacity and decrease the time it takes for those projects to gain approval.
MH: How much confidence do then take from heightened talk around support for expanded east-west energy infrastructure?
DY: I think it’s great that we’re hearing the conversation. There are many people, myself included, who wrote about it for a long time and we bear the scars of the conversations and the fact that the project didn’t go forward.
Obviously it’ll need to be structured differently. TC Energy has pretty much said this is not something that they’re looking at this point. So what does that look like going forward? Does the government have to get involved? How do we make sure that it’s de-risked, for both the proponent and for the producers, to fill that pipeline, so the long cycle capital can be risked? Those are questions that we still need answered before anything like that can go forward.
MH: Let’s say roadblocks are removed. There is a heightened push into interprovincial trade. What degree then do you see businesses abandoning trade into the U.S. marketplace?
DY: If we can increase our ability to trade amongst ourselves and to expand to other markets, then it’s the U.S. consumer, and it’s the U.S. market that will suffer because they will not have access to our goods that we have been supplying them.
Arguably, if you’re buying our goods at the Canadian dollar price, you’re getting a good deal to begin with and so this could cause their terms of trade to go up, and obviously has the potential to be inflationary, which is the last thing any of us want.
MH: How much interaction do you have with Chambers of Commerce south of the border? What are your counterparts down there saying about this whole situation?
DY: They’re very concerned about what this could mean for the for the U.S. economy because chambers are local, and what consumers will feel as a result of tariffs on the products.
Right now, it looks like we’ll have a 10-per cent tariff on oil. Well every time you go and fill up your car it’s going to be more expensive, and you’ll have that reminder every week. I don’t think that’s going to go over well.
Of course, that means that the more you spend on items, the less there is disposable to spend on other things in the economy, broadly speaking. So think of all those restaurants, those retailers, those organizations, those businesses, that will be impacted by a higher cost structure, which takes a bite out of the consumer’s wallet.
