Since 1988, Lanex Manufacturing, located just outside Windsor, Ontario, has been stamping large presses for doorstops, folding seat covers, tailpipe hangers, frame brackets and other custom metal parts for cars ranging from Corvettes. Honda minibuses.
But these days, worries about the future permeate the plant as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to enter the White House. He threatened to impose a 25 percent tariff on all goods exported from Canada to the United States. In Windsor, it will destroy its lifeblood: cars and everything that goes into them.
“Everybody's waiting for the next shoe to drop,” said Bruce Lane, president of Lanex, whose walls are painted concrete blocks. “If Windsor lost its car business, Windsor wouldn't survive.”
Few Canadian cities are more aware of the integration of the two countries' economies than Windsor. The city is across the Detroit River from Detroit, and Canada's maple leaf flag often flies alongside the stars and stripes there. No industry crosses borders more than automobile manufacturing.
“These workers in Windsor are more exposed to trade with the United States than anyone else,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at a steel mill during a recent visit to the city.
Mr. Trump, he added, is “proposing tariffs that will hurt not just people here in Windsor, but people across the country and indeed across the United States.”
Windsor shares two major landmarks with Detroit: the $5.7 billion Gordie Howe International Bridge, scheduled to open this year, and the 96-year-old Ambassador Bridge, which handles about $300 million in border trade each day. Of Canada's $440 billion in annual exports to the United States, only oil and gas account for more than cars, trucks and auto parts.
But after Canadian officials took Mr. Trump's word to follow through on his threat of tariffs, Mr. Lane and others in the auto industry are already bracing for potential damage.
George Papp is the CEO of Papp Plastics, headquartered near the new suspension bridge. He said U.S. customers, mostly automakers, would simply refer to the terms of the contracts he signed with them and deduct the cost of the tariffs from what they paid him.
“Who's going to get hit?” Mr. Papp said. “Me and people like me and companies like me.”
Flavio Volpe, president of the Auto Parts Manufacturers Association, a Canadian trade group, predicted that most of its members have single-digit profit margins and that Mr. Trump's threatened tariffs would be doomed.
The intertwining of the auto industry between the two countries was cemented in 1965 when Canada and the United States reached an agreement that effectively eliminated the border for the industry. Today, 90 percent of Canadian-made cars and trucks are shipped to the United States primarily by rail.
At Lanex, small metal parts that few motorists will see are shaped by the firm's presses with a pressure of over 600 tons. Their journeys show how the two countries' automotive industries are intertwined.
As a small supplier, Mr. Lane does not deal directly with automakers, but sells his goods through larger parts manufacturers. The seat latch hooks that Lanex makes for Honda vans are sent to another plant in Ontario, where they are fitted with other parts and then sent to a conveyor belt owned by a Japanese company called Honda in Alabama.
Mr. Lane's factory shipped the parts to Michigan for heat treatment, brought them back to Windsor for further processing, and then sold them to a US company.
“Windsor is used to going back and forth across the border,” Mr Lane said. “It's like getting out of bed in the morning.”
The confusion over possible tariffs comes at an already difficult time for Canada's auto business. Many auto parts manufacturers have yet to see their business return to pre-coronavirus pandemic levels due to a slump in auto sales. In 2020, Lanex had about 60 employees working two shifts, but now has about two dozen employees working one shift.
Concern is particularly acute in Windsor, a metropolitan area of about 484,000. Aside from the trucks roaring off the Ambassador Bridge, the city's most obvious automotive icon is the massive Stellantis factory, which produces Chrysler Pacifica minivans and Dodge Charger muscle cars.
A city within a city, European-based Stellantis 4500 employees work. It is building a battery plant in Windsor in a joint venture with South Korea's LG, with the help of billions of dollars in Canadian subsidies, and recently spent C$1.89 billion (about $1.3 billion) to retrofit an assembly plant to produce electric cars alongside gasoline. -strong ones.
But, like many automakers, Stellantis is now in decline as it struggles with the transition to electric cars and competition from China.
James Stewart, president of Windsor's local union representing Stellantis workers, said he doesn't believe the big tariff would necessarily be a fatal blow to Stellantis' operations in Windsor, given how much the company has invested.
But with much of Windsor's economic prosperity tied to trade with the United States, Mr. Stewart said the tariffs would hit hard, including closing businesses, laying off workers and cutting production.
“We are a suburb of Detroit; we've always felt that way,” he said, adding that Windsor seemed “under attack and for no reason.”
Mr. Trump initially characterized the tariffs as a way to encourage Canada and Mexico to better secure their borders to stem the flow of undocumented migrants.
But he also considered making Canada the 51st state, noted the US's heavy investment in Canada's military defense and threatened to use economic might. He also talked about what he described as the “subsidization” of Canada by the United States, an apparent reference to the US trade deficit with Canada, mainly oil and gas imports.
The Trudeau government is expected to provide more information how will he answer Against any US tariffs on Monday, the day Mr Trump takes office.
But Canada's relatively small economy makes it difficult for the country to inflict significant economic damage on the United States, although tariffs on specific products can hurt individual nations. Retaliatory tariffs will also raise prices in Canada.
Back at the Lanex plant, Mr. Lane said the company had started a “stealth” production project unrelated to cars by sheer accident, which had unexpectedly become a potential hedge against tariffs. He declined to offer any details so as not to alert his rivals.
Mr. Papp, the owner of plastics companies, said that while he opposed tariffs that would hurt his business, he was a fan of Mr. Trump and understood that the president-elect argued that tariffs were needed to help rebuild the industry. In the United States of America.
No matter what happens, Mr. Papp said Canada and the United States will always remain steadfast allies.
“You cannot separate our countries,” he said. “They are connected.”