tariff talk
If you grew up on this Island, you know somebody who worked in forestry. Maybe your dad, maybe your uncle, maybe the guy two doors down. It runs through families here.
And you know how that story goes. A mill goes quiet and it isn't only the people inside the gate. It's the guy who scales the logs, the guy who hauls them, the tire shop, the diner, the hockey registration that doesn't get paid that year. MacMillan Bloedel cut thirteen hundred jobs in BC in 1998 and was sold to Weyerhaeuser out of Washington state the next year. The Island kept working. The decisions about it moved south.
I thought about all of that last night when the trade talks fell apart.
Canada walked away from Trump's deal. I think that was the right call. No deal is better than a bad one, and the people who work for a living should not be the thing we hand over to make a bad one look finished.
But being right doesn't pay anyone's mortgage this month. Here is what it looks like from where we live.
The new 50 per cent tariffs hit plywood, veneer, MDF and fibreboard, cement and building materials, wine and spirits, and Canada is matching them dollar for dollar.
Coastal forestry was already in the worst stretch anyone here remembers. Twenty-one BC mills have closed permanently or indefinitely since 2023. These panel products were the last corner smaller operators could still sell into.
Then home to Saanich.
My husband renovates people's homes for a living, so I hear the price of sheet goods and the struggle to source materials, while we harvest food from the garden for the kitchen table. Materials climb, renovations get shelved, and the trades who had that work pencilled in start watching their phones instead of their calendars.
It lands on your tax bill too. We are paying for Fire Hall No. 2 right now, twenty-five and a half million dollars of it, inside a two hundred million dollar capital plan. We are paying to put pipe in the ground so our grandkids aren't paying for it later with interest on top. Concrete, steel, panel, pipe. Every one of those is a line in a budget written before this week, and when the price of the material moves, that gap doesn't disappear.
It shows up on a property tax notice, or it shows up as something that just doesn't get built.
Saanich council does not negotiate with Washington. A local candidate can not fix a trade war or change provincial rulings.
What a council owns is how long a permit sits while material costs climb. Whether a project that would have put local people to work stalls out waiting on us. Where our purchasing dollars land. Whether somebody in this community losing hours this fall ever finds out the retraining money already exists, or never hears a word about it.
Those are ours, and in a year like this one they matter more than usual.
The federal ask is simple and I'm adding my name to it. Hold the line on the deal, and get income support and retraining to people while they're losing the work, not after the negotiating wraps up.
I'm running because our community needs people who give a crap about our community, and who are still here after the news cycle moves on.
Let's move past division. Let's get things done.
