B.C.’s Finance Minister Brenda Bailey will hold a press conference on Monday afternoon following President Donald Trump’s inauguration in the United States.
That press conference will be livestreamed above at 3 p.m. PST.
Last week, Bailey said at a press conference that tariffs would be “unprecedented in modern times.”
In B.C., wood, pulp and paper, metallic minerals and energy producers are all major exports to the U.S.
For elected officials, whether or not Trump’s tariff threats will come to fruition remains a source of anxiety on Trump’s inauguration day.
“We will immediately begin the overhaul of our trade system to protect American workers and families,” Trump said in his speech.
“Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”
He did not specify what these tariffs would consist of.
“It seems like the first step will be a review of tariffs for Canada and Mexico and China and a broader review of the environment for those three countries, so there is room to continue the discussion and to push the argument forward that Canada is an indispensable trading partner for the United States,” said Stewart Prest, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia.
If the tariffs are put in place, it would mean a loss of $69 billion for B.C.’s economy by 2028, Bailey said last week.
It would mean 124,000 fewer jobs by 2028.
Investment would decline, with corporate profits falling by billions in 2025 and 2026, Bailey said.
The unemployment rate would increase to 6.7 per cent in 2025 and could increase to 7.1 per cent in 2026.
“The fact that the Trump administration is taking a step back here and offering a study as the first step suggests that the door is wide open to a range of possibilities, and so we might see a very targetted tariff supply to specific industries and that’s something that we really did experience in the first Trump administration on things like steel,” Prest added.
Federal cabinet ministers are also meeting for the next two days in Quebec.
This story will be updated following Bailey’s press conference.