For many U.S. businesses, the costs of tariffed Canadian cement and domestically sourced cement are essentially the same
Mark Thompson’s concrete business in northern New York has almost exclusively relied on cement from Canada for nearly half a century.
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Jefferson Concrete Corp., located in Watertown, about 30 kilometres from the Canadian border at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, uses roughly 4,000 tonnes of cement a year to manufacture everything from septic tanks and sewer infrastructure to bridge beams. Most of that cement comes from Ontario, with a smaller amount of specialty material imported from Montreal.
Now, those imports face a 50 per cent United States tariff as cement is among a broad range of Canadian products covering about US$20 billion in annual trade hit by the new duties.
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The new tariffs pose a potentially costly problem for Thompson and others in parts of the U.S. that are heavily dependent on Canadian cement and don’t have enough nearby domestic production to easily replace it.
The vice-president and co-owner of Jefferson Concrete expects he’ll have to eat much of the additional cost since about a third of his company’s next year’s work has already been quoted, including municipal sewer and bridge projects priced before the tariff took effect.
“I can’t pass this cost on,” he said. “I’ve got to absorb it.”
But despite the size of the tariff, Thompson isn’t planning to switch to U.S. cement.
