Flooring producers warn new U.S. tariff list could erase a quarter of Canadian sales
Canadian hardwood-flooring producers say newly targeted wood products could abruptly cut U.S. sales and place employment across their supply chain at risk.
Canadian flooring producers are warning that newly announced U.S. tariffs covering certain wood products, including flooring, could sharply disrupt their access to their principal export market. Jean-François Dufresne, president and chief executive of Canadian hardwood-flooring producer Preverco, told CTV News that the changes threaten the sector and could put thousands of jobs at risk. [1]
The report says the Trump administration announced the revised tariff list on Friday, removing some products from its targeted list while adding others. Newly affected goods include shampoos, soaps, certain paints, cocoa products, carpets and wood products that include flooring. CTV did not provide tariff rates, implementation details or an official estimate of the policy’s sector-wide effect in the readable report. [1]
For Preverco, Dufresne estimated that the change would eliminate 25 per cent of its business immediately. He said the company could neither pass the tariff through nor absorb it, characterizing the affected U.S. business as effectively lost. That is a company executive’s assessment reported by CTV, rather than an independently verified industry-wide outcome. [1]
The exposure described in the report extends beyond finished-flooring manufacturers. Dufresne said a downturn in flooring production would also affect sawmills, with employment consequences moving upstream through the wood-products supply chain. He also said producers have limited alternative markets without the United States, raising the risk that lost U.S. demand could translate quickly into production and staffing decisions. [1]
The report is a new warning of firm-level and potential supply-chain pressure, not confirmation that the projected job losses have occurred. Its immediate relevance for the forestry dashboard is that flooring is a wood-products outlet linked to sawmill activity; however, the available evidence is limited to one producer’s account and does not establish the scale of losses across Canadian forestry or the final commercial effects of the revised U.S. tariff list. [1]
Significance is moderate because the report identifies a quantified, newly reported business-loss claim—25 per cent of one major producer’s business—and a possible employment spillover from flooring into sawmills. The rating is not higher because the readable evidence provides a single company executive’s assessment, with no tariff rate, implementation detail, realized job-loss data or independent sector-wide corroboration. [1]